Project Echo

Project Echo bundles a public feedback portal, Kanban roadmap, and changelog into one workspace, and the Pro plan at $29/mo removes vendor branding and allows custom domains. That single upgrade is what lets an agency resell the portal as a client-facing engagement layer instead of paying for another internal tool. The economics flip when roadmap visibility becomes a billable retainer add-on rather than a cost line.

Project Echo's free plan carries unlimited workspaces, boards, team members, and feedback, but custom domains and branding removal sit behind Pro at $29/mo. That single line sets the agency margin threshold: every client workspace you white-label costs $29/mo before your own delivery time. An agency running five SaaS clients on the Project Echo Starter Portal at $299/mo pays $145/mo in Pro seats, leaving roughly $1,350/mo gross across the book before the 2h/mo maintenance per client. Drop to a $99/mo micro-retainer and the $29 seat eats 29% of revenue, which is why the threshold matters. Below five clients, resell the portal as a setup fee plus hourly work rather than a monthly retainer. Above five, the Pro seats amortize and the changelog plus Kanban roadmap become the visible deliverable clients renew against.

Priority Repricing Clause is the practice of writing the cost of a priority change into the roadmap artifact itself, so a client sees what a reshuffle does to timeline, budget, and deferred scope before anyone agrees to it. Agencies that plan in a shared roadmap tool hold a negotiation lever: the roadmap becomes a priced document rather than a wish list, and delivery teams stop absorbing silent scope drift into fixed retainers. The clause works because it converts an emotional request ("we need this now") into a trade ("this ships, that slips, the retainer moves by a set amount"). Concretely, a roadmap built in ProductPlan or airfocus can show a dependency chain breaking when one item jumps the queue, and a public-facing board in Project Echo makes the swap visible to the client's own stakeholders. Without that artifact, the agency argues from memory and usually loses.

Roadmap Volatility Index is a framework for measuring how often a client's stated priorities shift per delivery cycle, then pricing that movement into the retainer rather than absorbing it. Agencies track every change request against the original sequenced plan and score volatility as changes per month divided by active workstreams. Low volatility (under one change per month) supports fixed-fee retainers; high volatility justifies a change-order clause or a monthly reprioritization session billed separately. The model matters because roadmap tools make change cheap to request and expensive to deliver: a client dragging one item from Next to Now in ProdPad's Now-Next-Later view can invalidate weeks of sequenced work. Productboard and airfocus both expose prioritization history, which gives agencies an audit trail for the conversation. Without a volatility score, delivery teams become order-takers absorbing scope drift silently, and the retainer margin erodes one polite request at a time.

Run every client on the free plan until their portal needs their logo and domain, then move that single workspace to Pro at $29/mo and bill it inside the retainer instead of absorbing it.

Make every priority change a visible trade-off in the shared roadmap, showing what moves out, what slips, and what it costs, before any delivery work is re-sequenced.

IF your agency runs feedback and roadmap communication for 5 or more SaaS clients and needs the portal to carry the client's brand, THEN budget the Pro plan at $29/mo per client workspace because custom domain and branding removal are gated behind Pro, while the Free plan at $0 only covers unlimited workspaces, boards, team members, feedback, the feedback portal, and API and MCP Server access. IF you only need internal prioritization with no client-facing surface, THEN stay on Free and skip the paid tier entirely.

The choice turns on who reads the roadmap: Productboard suits embedded engagements where feedback volume justifies configuration, ProdPad suits agencies selling prioritization as a discipline, and Project Echo suits productized retainers that need a branded public surface. Whichever platform an agency picks, the negotiation lever comes from the artifact, not the license, because a sequenced plan with visible dependencies is what lets a delivery team price a priority change instead of absorbing it.

Stand up a branded Project Echo feedback portal, Kanban roadmap, and public changelog for a SaaS client, then hand over a self-managed loop the client's team can run without agency involvement.