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.

Client Visibility Boundary treats a project management platform as two products sharing one database: the internal delivery layer where capacity, budgets, and dependencies live, and the external surface a client actually opens. Agencies routinely buy for the internal layer and then expose it wholesale, which turns every internal field into a client-facing commitment. The boundary should be drawn per retainer, not per vendor. A platform with strong permissions lets a delivery lead track billable burn while the client sees only milestone status; a thin permission model forces either over-sharing or duplicate status reporting. The cost shows up in delivery hours, not licence fees. Forrester's September 2026 research found 83% of B2C marketing decision makers already work with AI agents, so clients now arrive expecting live status rather than weekly decks, which raises the value of a clean external surface and the risk of exposing raw internal boards.

Client Visibility Boundary is the discipline of splitting project management into two layers: an internal delivery surface where margin, capacity, and messy drafts live, and a client-facing surface that shows only approved milestones, status, and deliverables. Agencies that collapse the two layers expose internal rate cards, rework threads, and resource conflicts to clients, then spend retainer hours managing the fallout. The boundary matters because permissions and reporting are the two criteria the category description flags as decision drivers, and they are the ones most often deferred until after migration. A concrete case: monday.com and ClickUp both support granular guest permissions and client-specific dashboards, yet the same workspaces also expose time tracking and budget fields by default. Productive and Teamwork go further by tying budgets and profitability to the internal layer only. Set the boundary before you migrate, not after the first client asks why a task was reassigned three times.

Adoption Debt Compounding treats every licensed project management seat that never logs in as a compounding liability, not a sunk cost. The platform fee is the visible expense; the hidden expense is the coordination tax: status meetings that exist only because the tool is not trusted, duplicate task entry in spreadsheets, and account managers rebuilding timelines by hand. That tax grows with headcount and client count, so a 40-person agency carrying 30% dormant seats pays it on every retainer. The framework asks one question before renewal: what percentage of assigned seats touched a task in the last 14 days? Forrester's finding that 83% of B2C marketing decision makers already work with AI agents raises the stakes, because agent-driven status reporting only functions when the underlying task data is current. A platform with strong AI features and weak seat adoption produces confident-sounding summaries of stale work, which is worse for client trust than no automation at all.

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.

Keep internal delivery and client-facing visibility in separate workspaces joined by a synced status layer, and decide the split before you migrate anything.

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.