Your agency on CloudCannon

The Content Management System you build on decides how your clients access and edit their content, and how much of your code and infrastructure they can reach. It also decides who pays for the tools that run their website, whether the CMS integrates with the development tools your team already uses, and whether you retain ownership of your files.

As a Git-backed CMS, CloudCannon allows you to:

• Give each client as much control over their own content as you want.
• Keep each client away from your code and from your other clients' content.
• Decide how each client pays for editing and hosting, and fold that into your existing invoice structure.
• Let your developers keep building in the tools they already use, while everyone else edits the same files through CloudCannon.
• Retain ownership of your files. When you connect a website from a Git Repository, its files stay in that Git Repository, which you control, rather than in a database CloudCannon owns.

Those outcomes all depend on how your work is organized in CloudCannon. An Organization is your home base, holding your content, settings, and people. As an agency, your Organization can hold your own website, your clients' websites, or both, and in this guide you connect each one to CloudCannon from a Git Repository on your Git Provider.

Each Organization has a Subscription Plan, which determines how much you pay for CloudCannon, what features you have access to, and what resource limits you have. CloudCannon provides a range of Subscription Plans designed for teams of different sizes and requirements. All the work you do on an Organization is billed under a single invoice.

An Organization also contains:

• Any number of Sites. CloudCannon Sites differ from websites, as you can have many Sites which are all copies of the same website maintained for different purposes. Copies of the same website, such as its live and draft versions, can be grouped into a Project.
• A number of Custom Domains (e.g., example.com or company.net). You can connect any CloudCannon Site to a Custom Domain in your Organization and host it live on the internet, with options for subdomains, subpaths, and more.
• A number of Seats. Each Seat pays for one way into your Organization's content. You can invite Organization Members to view, edit, or publish content, using Permission Groups to set what each person can reach. You can also turn on Guest Access for a single Site, which lets people without CloudCannon accounts log in with a password.
• An amount of Build Time, which is the time CloudCannon spends building your Sites each month, and Hosting Bandwidth which is the data your live websites transfer to visitors' browsers.

We'll set up your agency's Organization later in this guide. You can optionally extend it by joining CloudCannon's Partner Program, which adds agency-specific UI, a Subscription Plan built for smaller clients, and discounts that grow as your client work does.

The Partner Program#

The Partner Program is for agencies and freelancers who build and maintain CloudCannon Sites for clients. There is no fee to apply, and CloudCannon turns your Organization into a Partner Organization once you are enrolled. A Partner Organization can set up a separate Organization for each client, called a Client Organization, which your agency manages on their behalf. A Client Organization is one of the two places your clients' Sites can live.

Every Partner Organization gets:

• Client Organizations — Create a separate Organization for any client you manage, keeping each client's team, Sites, settings, and Subscription Plan independent from your own and from each other. Only members of the Owners Permission Group in your Partner Organization can create one.
• The Partner Permission Group — Every Client Organization you create gets a Partner Permission Group with full Permissions, whose members mirror the Owners Permission Group in your Partner Organization. You can give anyone else in your agency access by adding them to that Client Organization's other Permission Groups, and members of your Partner Organization never contribute to a client's Seats.
• Extended Free Trials — Every Client Organization you create starts on a six-month Free Trial rather than the standard 21 days, allowing you to take your time building a client's website before you pay for the Subscription Plan. Five actions shorten that trial so that it ends five days later: serving a Site on a Subdomain that wasn't serving one yet, turning on Guest Access, adding an Organization Member from outside your Partner Organization, sharing a Site using Site Sharing, or accepting a transfer that brings in a Subdomain serving a Site, a Site with Guest Access turned on, or a new Site Sharing member into the Client Organization. For more information, please read our documentation on how billing works in the Partner Program.
• An extra Subscription Plan — The Lite Plan is a low-cost, pay-as-you-go Subscription Plan that only members of the Partner Program can select. We'll compare it against the Standard Plan further on in this guide.
• New links in your App Sidebar — Gain a Clients link in your App Sidebar that opens the Client Organizations Browser, where you can search and filter your Client Organizations, and a Rewards link that opens the Partner Rewards page, where you can keep track of your progress through the Partner Program. The Rewards link appears only for members of the Owners Permission Group. Your Organization's own Sites, Projects, and Custom Domains links move down the App Sidebar, underneath a new Your Org heading, while Home stays above your Clients link. Each of those links appears only when your Partner Organization already has what it points to, or you have permission to create it, so someone without those permissions in a Partner Organization that holds none of them sees no Home, Sites, Projects, or Custom Domains links. They still see the Clients link, the Your Org heading, and Org Settings below it.
• Client Health Checks — Available through a private Beta, the Health tab on your Organization Home will also show the result of Health Checks on your Client Organizations, as well as Sites within your Partner Organization, warning you about failed builds and syncs, unresolved Custom Domains, expiring SSL Certificates, Free Trials that are ending, subscriptions that need attention, and inactive clients.
• An onboarding session — Talk through your agency's setup on a call with our team, which you can arrange with our support team once you have joined.

The Partner Program has four tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. As your clients start paying for their Client Organizations, you earn Partner Points and move up through these tiers, which give your agency an increasing discount on Subscription Plans for you and your clients. The discount rises from 10% at Silver to 20% at Platinum, and you apply it yourself, as a coupon on each Subscription Plan you want to discount. Each tier also unlocks benefits such as a listing in the CloudCannon Experts Directory, priority support, client referrals, and co-marketing. For the points each tier requires and the full list of benefits, please read our documentation on what Partner Points and Rewards are.

We'll cover how to join the Partner Program once your agency's Organization is set up.

In the next step of this guide, we'll compare the two places your clients' Sites can live.