Customers, projects and clients

Where customers come from

A customer appears on /customers as soon as usage tagged with its customer_ref arrives for the month you are viewing. There is no list to create first. To tag calls with a customer, see Attribution; use an opaque id, not an email or a name. Usage without a customer still counts in every other total, but it is not listed here.

Until the first tagged call arrives the page shows No customer-tagged traffic yet with a snippet to copy.

The customer list

The page shows one month at a time; use the month arrows at the top to move between months.

The table lists Customer, Last seen, Events, Cost and Margin, and every column sorts. A customer without revenue for the month shows no revenue entered and an Add revenue link instead of a margin. The “confirmed through” label above the table is the last day whose figures are confirmed.

If your workspace is over its plan's usage limit and the grace period has ended, Customers shows the current month only.

Enter revenue

Revenue is one number per customer per month, in USD: what you charge the customer, not what they cost you. Token Meter does not read it from a billing system.

• One customer: open the customer and use Enter revenue (Month, Revenue (USD), Save).
• Many customers: on /customers choose Import revenue and paste rows of customer_ref,month,revenue_usd, month as YYYY-MM:

customer_ref,month,revenue_usd
acme,2026-08,4200
nimbus-logistics,2026-08,5200

The header row is optional. Rows with a bad month or amount are skipped, and the page reports how many were imported and skipped. Entering a month that already has revenue replaces it. The import is all or nothing: either every valid row is saved or none is.

A customer's page

Click a customer to open its page:

• Margin this month, with revenue, cost and one sentence on how sure the figure is. Without revenue for the current month it asks you to add it.
• Cost trend for the last 30, 90 or 180 days. Solid means provider-confirmed events; hatched (≈) is estimated.
• Requests: the newest 25 calls tagged with this customer, including today, with a link to the full list in Requests.
• Top actions: the 10 most expensive action names for this customer, with events, traces, average cost per trace and errors.
• Revenue history: the last 12 months of revenue you entered, with when it was last changed.

Create a project

On /projects choose New project, enter a Title, choose the Client and optionally a Target date. Without a client yet, the page asks you to add one first. Use Edit details on the project to change its title, description, target date, status (Draft, Active, On hold, Completed, Archived) and health (On track, Needs client input, At risk, Completed). These are shown to the client, so a project lead or an admin changes them.

The project list puts at-risk projects first and shows Active, At risk, Needs client and Drafts waiting counts.

The project tabs

• Delivery: Milestones (internal until you choose Show to client), Updates (saved as drafts; Publish to client when ready; a published update is read-only until you Unpublish it), and Deliverables (links to staging sites, designs, documents, pull requests and demos, each published separately; links must be https).
• Client: Client access (grant, resend or revoke), Requests and General discussion. Only people who can publish to the client see this tab.
• Integrations: linked GitHub repositories and the AI cost mapping rules (see below). Linking a repository reads only activity counts: no code, diffs or commit messages. With linked repositories you can draft an update from pull requests merged in the last 30 days; it is saved as a draft.
• Financials: quote, invoicing, expenses and margin. Only people with the owner, CTO or CFO billing role see it.
• Team and notes: internal notes (never shown to clients), the project team, and Archive project.

Requests

On the Client tab choose New request and pick what it is:

• Approval of something they can see: needs a published update, published link or client-visible milestone as its subject, and at least one contact with the Approver role.
• A decision I need from them, or Feedback: a subject is optional.

Approvers are emailed when the request is sent and get reminders while it stays pending. An approval is tied to the exact content it was sent with: if you edit, unpublish or hide that content, or archive the project, the pending request is withdrawn, and the client sees it as withdrawn. You can also Withdraw request yourself.

Your replies in a request or in General discussion are visible to the client, and the contacts concerned get an email saying there is a reply (at most one per contact per project per hour). The email carries no message text and no sign-in link. Client responses and comments reach you in a digest email.

Project members

Owners and admins open every project. In team workspaces, anyone else needs a role on the project, set by an admin on Team and notes with Add to project:

• Contributor edits the working content: internal milestones, update drafts, deliverable links and notes.
• Lead also publishes to the client, manages client access and requests, edits the project details and AI cost rules, and unlinks repositories.

Members without a role on a project don't see it in the list. Money is never part of a project role.

Live refresh

An open project page checks for changes every 20 seconds while the tab is visible and reloads its data when a client answers a request, writes a message or opens their invitation. Nothing reloads otherwise, so a form you are filling in is left alone.

Connect a project to your usage

On Integrations › AI cost mapping, choose Add rule:

See Attribution for how to set these tags. A tag or customer reference can belong to one project in the workspace, so the same usage is never counted twice. A linked GitHub repository adds an estimated cost: each person's vendor-reported daily spend spread over the repositories they committed to that day. It is a separate source from tagged usage, so spend that appears in both is counted in both.

Record the money

On Financials, under Quote, invoicing and labour: Currency, Quoted, Invoiced, Received, Exchange rate to USD (not needed for USD), Rate as of, Estimated hours, Hourly rate, and the AI usage from and to dates. Leave the dates blank to count AI cost from the day the project was created until today. Add expenses with a category, amount, kind (Measured, a real receipt, or Estimated), date and note. Every change is recorded with its before and after values, and removing an expense is recorded rather than deleted. The currency can't change while expenses are recorded in it.

How project margin is computed

• Revenue is the most reliable figure you recorded: received, else invoiced, else quoted, converted to USD with your exchange rate.
• Cost is the AI cost tagged to the project, plus the estimate from linked repositories, plus expenses, plus estimated labour (hours × hourly rate).
• Unattributed AI cost (usage in the window that no project's rule claims) is not in the figure. It is shown beside it and turns the figure into a range: at best none of it belongs to this project, at worst all of it does.

Invite a client contact

1. Add the contact on the client's page, or open the project's Client tab and choose Grant access.
2. Pick the role: Guest can view; Approver can also answer requests.
3. Token Meter emails an invitation with a single-use sign-in link that is valid for 72 hours. The contact's status moves from Queued to Sent, then to Opened once they view the project.

Changing a contact's role sends nothing. Resend invite sends a fresh link and cancels the earlier one. To send invitations your own account email must be verified, and each workspace has a daily invitation limit.

Signing in

The invitation link opens a page with a Continue button; the link is used only when the contact clicks it, so email scanners that open links don't use it up. Later, contacts sign in at the portal by entering their email and choosing Email me a link. That link works once and expires in 15 minutes. A session lasts up to 30 days, and ends after 7 days without a visit.

What the client sees

A contact with access to one project goes straight to it; with several, they get a list. For each project they see:

• the title, description, health and target date;
• milestones you chose to Show to client, with progress and what is next;
• published updates, newest first;
• published deliverable links;
• requests, which an Approver answers with Approve, Request changes or Decline (a note is required for the last two);
• comments on requests and a general discussion. Contacts can post up to 20 comments an hour and remove their own comment within 15 minutes.

The portal page also refreshes itself every 20 seconds while it is open, when something on the project changes.

When your subscription lapses

The portal becomes read-only for a grace period: contacts can still read, but cannot answer requests or comment, and they see “Updates are paused for now”. After the grace period they can no longer sign in.