Introduction

Welcome to the Set up your agency guide! 👋

This guide is for developers and agencies who build and maintain websites for clients. If you are deciding whether CloudCannon fits how you work, or have an account with no clients yet, this guide teaches you how to structure client work, the benefits and drawbacks of each approach, and how to give a client access to their own content.

In this guide, we'll cover how to:

• Understand the basics of CloudCannon for agencies, including what an Organization is and how CloudCannon's Partner Program can benefit your agency
• Decide whether each client's Sites live in a separate Client Organization or inside your own Organization, and compare the three ways a client can reach their content
• Create your CloudCannon account, set up your agency's Organization, and, if you choose to, join the Partner Program to turn it into a Partner Organization
• Choose a Subscription Plan for your agency and start your Subscription
• Create your first Client Organization, if you want to use one, and choose a Subscription Plan for it
• Give your client a login to edit their own content, and decide who pays for it
• Move a client's Sites between your own Organization and a Client Organization when their needs change

By the end of this guide, you will have a structure for your client work, an agency Organization on a Subscription Plan that covers your whole team, a first client set up with their own login, and a way to change that structure later.

Before we begin, this guide assumes you build or maintain websites for other people, and that you have website files you can connect to CloudCannon from a Git Repository. Additionally, this guide covers the Standard Plan, and the Lite Plan available through the Partner Program, as entry points for your agency's own Organization. Each client you put in a Client Organization carries their own Subscription Plan, so we'll compare the options for a client separately, from the Lite Plan through to the Enterprise Plan.

This guide also assumes you are a member of the Owners Permission Group in your agency's Organization. If you created the Organization, you already are. If you are not an Owner, ask one to add you to that group or to make those changes for you.

This guide is about structure and cost across several clients, so it does not cover connecting a single website to CloudCannon or setting up editing for it. If you have not created a Site before, please read our documentation on getting started with CloudCannon, which walks through creating an Organization, connecting a Site, and writing the Configuration File that makes your files editable. We'll point back to it twice, once when your agency's Organization is ready and you can try CloudCannon on your Free Trial, and again when you add your first client's Site.

In the next step of this guide, we'll look at how an agency fits together on CloudCannon, and what the Partner Program adds.