Radius

Radius caps its Free plan at 100 members and 2 organisers, so any client community that grows past that ceiling forces an upgrade decision at exactly the moment the client can see traction. The Pro plan at $15/month removes the member cap and adds group analytics, which means an agency can run a client community for a year on less than the cost of one billable hour. The strategic play is not the software margin, it is packaging event hosting and member management as a $300/mo managed service.

Permission Boundary Cost treats external client access as a design constraint that reshapes internal delivery, not a checkbox added at the end of a rollout. Every shared board, guest seat, or client-facing status view forces a decision about what internal commentary, margin data, and draft work stays hidden, and each of those decisions adds configuration and review time to every project. Agencies that map the boundary before migration avoid rebuilding templates twice; those that grant visibility first usually spend the next quarter walking it back. The cost is real but hard to see: a single shared workspace can mean dozens of per-project permission rules that a delivery lead maintains by hand. The frame matters because client-facing visibility is often the stated reason for switching platforms, yet the internal tax it creates rarely appears in the business case. Productive and Teamwork both bundle client access with financial data, which raises the stakes on where that line sits.

Every project management platform has two surfaces: the internal one your delivery team lives in, and the client-facing one your retainer depends on. The Client Visibility Surface framework says the second surface, not the first, sets your adoption ceiling. A tool with deep internal capacity but clumsy guest permissions forces account managers into screenshot-and-email workarounds, and that manual relay becomes the real coordination cost. Basecamp's deliberately flat client access and Plutio's white-label workspace both trade internal depth for a cleaner external surface, while Wrike and Asana push granular guest roles that need configuration before a client ever logs in. The framework matters because client constraints are a stated evaluation input, not an afterthought. Forrester's Q3 2026 research found workflow integration, not model selection, separates agencies scaling AI profitably, and the same logic applies here: the surface your client touches determines whether shared visibility reduces status meetings or adds a second reporting layer.

Migration drag coefficient is the ratio of switching cost to the workflow gain a new project management platform actually delivers. Agencies routinely price the subscription and ignore the drag: historical task data that will not import cleanly, client-specific permission maps, automations rebuilt from scratch, and the two to six weeks of reduced delivery throughput while teams relearn. A platform that wins on features but carries high drag can cost more in the first quarter than it saves in the first year. The framework forces the comparison onto total cost of transition, not list price. It also explains why standardization stalls: a single client with unusual access rules or an embedded approval chain can hold an entire agency on a legacy stack. The practical move is to score drag before scoring features, and to pilot on one retainer rather than migrating the whole book at once.

Adopt radius only when a client's core need is hosting local events and managing member RSVPs, and keep it on the Free plan until a group passes 100 members or needs analytics.

Compare total migration cost, including rework, retraining, and client re-onboarding, against the annual seat delta before committing to a switch.

IF your agency runs recurring local events for client communities and needs to manage multiple groups under one organisation, THEN the Network plan's organisation-level billing and centralised group management fit, while the Free plan's 100-member and 2-organiser caps force an upgrade to Pro at $15/month per group once a client community grows. IF the client's goal is lead generation or sales automation rather than event hosting and member management, THEN skip radius because its core strength is RSVPs, waiting lists, and reminders, not pipeline.

A productized retainer where the agency builds and runs a client's local Radius community: branded group, recurring event calendar, RSVP and waiting-list automation, and monthly attendance reporting. Priced at $300/mo against $15/mo Pro or $0 Free, the margin sits in delivery labor, not software.