Agency client intake and onboarding software for agencies, consultants and freelancers

Agencies do not have a lead volume problem so much as a lead sorting problem. A contact form is free to submit and costs nothing to fill in badly, so the inbox mixes serious buyers with students, competitors doing research, procurement teams collecting three quotes to justify a decision already made, and people whose budget is a tenth of your minimum.

The expense is not the reading. It is that judging fit requires someone senior. A junior can answer an email but cannot tell you whether a vague brief about "refreshing our brand" is a $12,000 project or a $120,000 one, or whether the person asking can sign anything. So the sorting lands on a founder, a strategy director or a principal, at the exact moment their hours are worth the most.

Then the discovery call compounds it. An hour with a lead who has no budget costs the agency the hour, plus the prep, plus the follow-up, plus the context switch. Agencies that field forty inquiries to sign eight are spending most of their business development time on the thirty-two.

Qualification is the fix, and every agency knows it. What stops it happening is that a longer form kills conversion from good leads as well as bad ones, and nobody wants to interrogate a potential client at the first hello. A conversation solves what a form cannot, because it can ask a follow-up question only when the previous answer warrants one.

Four criteria separate a real opportunity from a time sink at almost every agency, and they are worth setting explicitly rather than leaving to instinct.

Budget is first and it is the one agencies are squeamish about asking. You do not need an exact figure. You need to know which side of your minimum engagement the project sits on, and an intake conversation can ask that as a range without the awkwardness of a person asking it out loud. An inquiry that will not answer at all is itself a strong signal.

Scope and deliverables come next, because the same three words mean wildly different projects. A website can be five pages on a template or a bespoke platform. Capturing what they think they need, in their words, is more useful than making them pick from a dropdown that reflects how you sell rather than how they buy.

Timeline separates the serious from the speculative better than almost anything. Someone with a launch date, a funding round or a rebrand deadline is buying. Someone exploring options for next year may be genuine, but they are not this quarter's pipeline, and knowing that changes how you spend the call.

Decision authority is the one most often skipped. Finding out at the pitch that the person you have been talking to needs to take it to two other people is a preventable surprise. Ask early who else will be involved in the decision, and the answer costs nothing to collect.

The tools agencies already use for this are mostly document collection and client management platforms, and they are good at what they do. Read from their own pricing pages on 24 August 2026, Dubsado runs $35 or $55 a month, HoneyBook publishes $29, $49 and $109 a month billed yearly, and Content Snare runs $35 to $215 a month billed annually.

Dubsado and HoneyBook are the two most common in creative and marketing agencies, and they stretch furthest across the whole client lifecycle: forms, proposals, contracts, invoices and scheduling in one subscription. Watch the tier gating on HoneyBook, because the $29 Starter plan does not include the scheduler or the QuickBooks Online sync, and caps you at two live lead forms. If you want onboarding that books meetings, the real entry point is $49.

Dubsado prices differently and it suits growing teams well. It is flat per account with three additional users free, then user bands at $25 a month for four to ten people, $45 for eleven to twenty and $60 for twenty-one to thirty. An agency of eight pays the same base rate as a solo designer plus $25.

Content Snare is the specialist. It does one job, chasing content and assets out of clients, and it does it better than the generalists. Its unusual meter is worth understanding: plans are limited by requests active at the same time, and recipients never count toward the limit. For an agency waiting on brand assets from clients who take months to send them, that meter is the whole cost model.

All three start after the client has agreed to work with you. None of them screen the inquiry. That is the division of labour, and plenty of agencies should run one of them alongside an intake agent rather than instead of one.

The point of intake is not the screening on its own. It is that by the time a qualified lead reaches a calendar slot, your team should not have to spend the first twenty minutes of the call establishing basics.

A usable brief carries the project in the client's own words, the budget range, the timeline and any fixed date driving it, who else is involved in the decision, what they have tried before and why it did not work, and the assets: current site, brand guidelines, examples of work they like and dislike. Collected during intake, all of that arrives before the pitch rather than in a follow-up email chain afterwards.

The difference shows up in the first five minutes of a pitch. Walking in knowing the launch date, the budget band and the fact that the marketing director hated their last agency's reporting changes what you present. Walking in with a name and a one-line inquiry means spending the meeting doing discovery you could have automated.

Our pricing is planned at $49, $129 and $299 a month per firm rather than per seat or per project, and it is not purchasable yet, so treat those as intended launch figures rather than something you can buy today.