Studio

We’re building the tool we needed to keep stakeholders aligned

A tool for the oldest problem in client work: remembering what was agreed.

Some of the most useful software started as a fix for the people who built it. Basecamp began as 37signals’ way of running its own client projects. Slack began as the chat tool a games company built for its own team.

The pattern makes sense. When you build for yourself, you can’t fool yourself about whether it works. You feel the problem every week, and you know exactly when it’s gone.

That’s how we approach new products at Gruow. This is the story of the first one: a tool for the oldest problem in client work, remembering what was agreed.

How we stumbled on it

We’ve done work we never got paid for. Not because a client acted in bad faith, but because nobody could say quickly what had been agreed months earlier.

It usually starts small. A request arrives in an email or comes up on a call. It sounds reasonable, it’s quick, and saying no feels petty, so it gets done. A few more follow. Months later, neither side can say for sure whether that work was in the original scope, whether it was ever priced, or whether it was billed. The agreement is a PDF in someone’s inbox. The changes are spread across email threads, call notes and chat.

When we looked back at the jobs where this happened, the problem was never the conversation. It was the record. Clients forget what was agreed too, and they’re as frustrated as we are when the answer takes an afternoon of digging. Both sides were missing the same thing: one place that shows what was agreed and everything that has changed since.

It gets harder as more people are involved. When a job includes partners or contractors, there’s a second set of promises, and a change on one side touches the other.

It isn’t just us

Once we started looking, the same story turned up everywhere.

In a 2025 survey of 273 US agency leaders, run by the billing company Ignition, only 1% said they bill for all out-of-scope work. 78% rarely or only sometimes charge for it. The money problem spreads from there: 71% said at least one in four invoices is paid late, and 63% called their cash flow unpredictable. Ignition sells tools for this problem, so treat its numbers as a strong signal rather than the final word.

The wider data points the same way. In the Project Management Institute’s 2018 survey, 52% of projects completed in the previous year had experienced scope creep, up from 43% five years earlier.

The most telling number comes from Karl Sakas, who advises agency owners. When a client asks for something extra and the agency replies “would you like me to estimate that?”, he finds about half of clients drop the request and 40% ask for the estimate. The last 10% say they thought it was already included. That 10% isn’t a pricing problem. It’s two people remembering the same agreement differently.

Why nothing on the market closes the gap

Before building anything, we read through reviews and forum threads about the tools agencies already use for proposals, contracts, billing and client portals. Plenty of good software exists. It just stops at the wrong moment.

Agreements freeze at signature. Proposal tools are built to get a document signed. After that, changing it is awkward. “Once a document is sent, you’re kind of stuck with it,” one PandaDoc user wrote. In Ignition, adjusting a signed proposal creates a linked copy the client has to accept again, and payments have to be switched back on by hand.

The all-in-one tools are heavy. Agency management platforms can track everything, but setup is the most common complaint across them. Some are hard to configure without paying for implementation.

Clients don’t log in. Portals assume the client will visit. Many won’t. “90% just didn’t use it and still asked everything by email,” one web designer wrote.

Small fixes haven’t stuck. At least nine small scope-creep tools have launched in the past few years, most with barely a comment on their launch posts. Across eight forum threads about scope creep, nobody named a change-order tool they used.

So agencies cope by hand. They absorb small changes to protect the relationship, add a 10 to 15% buffer to quotes, and keep a list of extras to raise later, in a spreadsheet or a shared doc.

Other industries solved this long ago. In construction, a change order is a normal, signed amendment to the original contract, priced before the work starts. Event-planning software has the same thing built in. Agency tools mostly don’t.

What we’re building

We’re building a shared record of what was agreed and everything that has changed since, which the studio and the client can both see. Its working name is Lobby.

We won’t go into how it works yet. The principles are simple:

  • The agreement stays live. It changes only when the client approves, and every version is kept.
  • It meets people where they already work. Most client conversations happen in email, so that’s where it starts.
  • It doesn’t replace your other tools. Project and accounting tools stay where they are.
  • It works for both sides. The client gets the same clear answer we do, without having to ask.

The data also showed us the hard part. 78% of agencies don’t reliably charge for extra work, often because raising it feels awkward. A better record alone won’t fix that. The tool has to make the right conversation easy to start, so we’re designing for that from the beginning.

How we’ll learn from it

Gruow is the first user. We’ll run our own client work through it from the start, and measure it the only way that counts: work that would have gone unbilled, and now doesn’t.

We’ll write about what we learn here, including what doesn’t work. If it doesn’t save us money, it won’t save anyone else’s. If it does, we’ll open it to other studios.

That’s the kind of innovation we believe in. Not a guess about someone else’s problem, but a fix for one we live with every week.

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