Atriqa Studios · in development
Where the work leaks: between the scope you agreed and the invoice you sent.
Every tool an agency buys either stops at deal won or starts at project kickoff. The margin goes missing in between. Atlas is one spine across that gap — scope, approval, hours, invoice — for branding and social agencies running retainers.
- Retainer
- 4,500 €
- Scoped
- 40 hrs
- Delivered
- 47 hrs
- In the SOW
- 32 hrs
- Out of scope
- 15 hrs
Margin
28%11%
02The problem
Four agency owners describing the same leak, in their own words.
These are verbatim, from live primary sources — Reddit threads and Capterra reviews, pulled and cited in our research file. Not a persona, not a survey we commissioned, not a statistic with no traceable origin.
Why the work goes unbilled
“Frequently, I don't charge for it simply because creating a new addendum and updating the invoice manually takes too much time.”
r/agency
Why month-end is too late
“Agencies don't have clean visibility into hours tracked against the original retainer scope in real time, so by the time they realize something is out of scope, it's already delivered.”
r/agency
Why the spreadsheet doesn't help
“We still don't have a clear way to see project profitability while the project is happening. Profit only becomes clear after everything is delivered.”
r/smallbusiness · 5-person agency
Why every ask costs a conversation
“There was no pre-agreed process for what happens when that request comes in, so every instance turns into an improvised negotiation.”
IndieHackers
And the number underneath that number
Scope creep is the symptom most owners name. The more credible diagnosis is that the margin was never real.
The same pricing consultant who published the 28%-to-11% math argues that the usual diagnosis is wrong: it is a loaded cost gap. Revenue minus salaries is not margin. It ignores the 1.35–1.4× true cost of employing someone, and it silently assumes people are billable 100% of the time when the real figure is 65–70%.
Applied to one 6,500 €/month retainer showing a comfortable “35% margin”, the corrected figure came out at 6%. If a system reports margin without carrying loaded cost and real utilisation, it reports fiction — exactly like the spreadsheet it replaced.
6,500 € retainer · reported vs. corrected
Same retainer. Same month. The difference is entirely in what the arithmetic counted.
03How it works
One record, carried from the ask to the invoice line.
Not four tools with exports between them. The same object moves through four states, which is why the invoice can know what the request was.
- 01
The ask gets logged before the work starts
Every client request — including the ad-hoc ones that arrive as a Slack message or a line at the end of a call — is recorded against the retainer with an estimate. That record is the ledger everything else reads from.
Design budget: under 30 seconds to log, or nobody logs it
- 02
It resolves against terms you already agreed
The overage rate, the approval threshold, and who can authorise are captured when the contract is signed — not negotiated per request. So an out-of-scope ask has a defined path instead of becoming a conversation.
Removes the improvised negotiation
- 03
Hours burn down against the cap in daylight
Consumed against cap, pace-adjusted, visible every day. A day-12 pacing signal tells you a retainer is tracking hot while you can still do something about it.
Day 12, not day 31
- 04
The addendum and the invoice update together
Approve an overage and the contract addendum and the invoice line are generated from the same record. One weekly digest goes to the client summarising what fell outside scope — one message, not five separate addendums.
The reason the work stops being free
04What it does
Seven modules. One of them is the reason you would switch.
M2 · Retainers — the differentiator
A cap you can see burning down, and a request ledger underneath it.
A retainer is defined by a monthly cap in hours, in deliverable counts, or both — because branding agencies scope both ways (“20 hours” or “16 posts + 2 reels”). Consumption is visible daily, pace-adjusted, with a day-12 signal. When an incoming request would breach the cap, the system flags it and produces an approve-overage-or-defer decision rather than quietly absorbing it.
- Every ask logged against the retainer with an estimate, before work starts
- One-click addendum and invoice update from a flagged request
- Overage rate, approval threshold and authoriser agreed at signing
- One weekly scope digest to the client, not five separate addendums
- Auto-renewal tracking, notice periods, annual escalators
31.5/ 40 hrs
79% of the cap consumed with 18 days left in the period.
- Pending requests
- 3
- Est. hours in those requests
- 6.0
- Projected overage
- +9.5 hrs
M1 · Pipeline
The CRM half, shaped for how briefs actually arrive
Companies, contacts, leads, activities and proposals on stages that match agency reality — enquiry, qualified, brief received, proposal sent, negotiation, won. Engagement model (retainer, project, hybrid) is set at the deal, because it determines everything downstream.
- Deal value split into monthly value, contract months, and one-time value
- Service type per deal: branding, social, content, paid ads, web, full retainer
- Lost-reason taxonomy, so win/loss analysis is possible later
M3 · Delivery
Proof rounds, with a contracted limit that is actually enforced
Projects to deliverables to tasks, with deliverable types native to branding work — logo concepts, brand guidelines, social post, reel, carousel, campaign, pitch deck. Proof rounds are version-tracked and numbered, and the contracted round limit is a real ceiling: exceeding it triggers the same overage path as an out-of-scope request.
- Brand guidelines attached per client, with a checklist gate before a proof goes out
- Content calendar view for social clients — they think in calendars, not Gantt charts
- Round 4 on a three-round contract is a billable event, not a favour
M4 · Time, capacity & true margin
Loaded cost per person, not billable rate
Each person carries a salary, a loading factor (default 1.375×) and a realistic utilisation assumption (default 67%). True margin per client and per project is computed from that — which is what makes the number real instead of the figure the spreadsheet has been reporting.
- Time logging a designer will actually do: timer, mobile, Telegram, bulk weekly entry
- Capacity view — who is over or under allocated across the next two weeks
- Effective hourly rate per client, which surfaces the clients that lose money
M5 · Commercial
Invoices that already know what happened
Proposals from templates convert to a retainer or project on won. Recurring invoices for retainers, milestone invoices for projects, with GST for India and 5% VAT for the UAE handled per tenant country. Payment tracking and ageing feed a 90-day cash view of expected in against committed out.
- Leakage report: unbilled hours, unbilled overages, extra proof rounds, quantified
- Flat per tenant, unlimited seats — a freelancer who only fills timesheets costs nothing
- No usage-metered surprises stacked on top of the agreed figure
M6 · Client portal
Simple enough that a client uses it instead of replying by email
Magic-link access, no password. Approve or reject a proof with comments, see retainer consumption, read reports, and submit requests — which land directly in the request ledger, which is where scope capture should begin.
- A client who needs training will email their approval instead, and the feature dies
- Portal users never see anything internal — no margin, no capacity, no other clients
M7 · Ops intelligence
AI aimed at your operations, never at your creative
Scope-creep alerts, capacity forecasts, at-risk client detection, and monthly client reports drafted from real project data rather than hand-typed. The research is unambiguous that agencies regard creative output as the thing they sell, so generating a client's content is explicitly out of scope.
- “Acme is at 80% of hours with 12 days left”
- “Next week is 130% allocated; Priya is the constraint”
- Explicitly not in scope: writing or designing your client's content
What it deliberately is not
The refusals are the product.
The strongest criticism of the incumbent all-in-one platform, from a customer paying its agency tier, is: “their business model is do everything, but do nothing well.” The test for every future request is whether it deepens the scope-to-invoice seam or widens us toward becoming that. So:
- No funnel or landing-page builder
- No email marketing platform
- No social scheduling or publishing
- No media buying or ad trafficking
- No full accounting ledger
- No AI writing your client's content
It integrates rather than replaces. Your ads manager, Figma, Canva, Slack and accounting system stay exactly where they are.
05The agent layer
Ask in plain language, from Telegram, without opening the dashboard.
Not a chatbot bolted onto the side. It queries the same records the dashboard renders, and it can write to them — logging time from your phone is one message. It exists because a system nobody opens produces no data, and a retainer tracker with no data is a spreadsheet with extra steps.
- Which retainers are over 80% burn?
- Three. Acme at 79% on day 12, Nord at 88% on day 19, Vela at 104% — Vela is already past cap with two pending requests unapproved.
- What's outstanding from clients over 30 days?
- Four invoices, oldest 61 days. Aged summary by client, with the last payment date on each.
- Log 3 hours on Acme brand guidelines
- Logged against the Acme retainer, current period. Consumption updated to 34.5 of 40 hours.
- Who's free next week?
- Two people under 60% allocated; one is over at 130%. Names and the deliverables driving it.
And it speaks first when something needs a decision.
The proactive push is the half that matters. You should not have to remember to check whether a retainer is running hot.
- A retainer crosses its pacing threshold mid-month
- An approval has been sitting with a client too long
- An invoice moves past due
- Next week's allocation exceeds capacity
- A deal goes stale without an activity logged
Every agent action is written to an append-only audit log — which prompt, which tools, which user, when.
06Where this actually stands
Atlas is in development. Not shipped, not in beta, not a waitlist for something already running.
There are no customer logos on this page because there are no customers yet. There are no testimonials, no “agencies save 12 hours a week” figure, and no screenshots — because the software those screenshots would show does not exist. Every number on this page comes from cited research about the problem, not from claims about our product.
Primary research
28 sources
Reddit threads, Capterra reviews and IndieHackers posts pulled from live sources this month, with permalinks. Quoted on this page verbatim.
Written specification
7 modules
A full product requirements document — data model, module scope, build phases, and an explicit list of what we refuse to build.
Build sequence
10 phases
Retainer tracking and the request ledger are scheduled second, before delivery. Building delivery first would produce another project-management tool.
Which is why the meeting is the offer, and not a demo.
We are looking for a small number of branding and social agencies to shape this while it is still cheap to change — how your caps are written, whether you scope in hours or deliverables, what your change-order terms actually say, where your proof rounds overrun. Those answers determine what gets built, in what order.
If you want a finished product to evaluate, we are the wrong conversation this quarter. If you want the thing to fit your book, this is the right moment to say so.
About the maker
Atlas is built by Atriqa Studios, an integrated marketing and AI services company working across India and the UAE. The first deployment is for a branding and social agency, which is where the module scope came from.
We run agency work ourselves. The seam this product covers is one we have been on the wrong side of.
07Questions
The things you would ask on the call anyway.
How is this different from GoHighLevel?
GoHighLevel is built for lead-gen agencies reselling software. It has no creative approval layer, no retainer hours-against-cap view, and no proof rounds — because its customers do not sell creative work. Atlas covers a narrower span deliberately: branding and social retainer operations only. No funnels, no email marketing, no website builder. The moment we add a landing-page builder we have become the thing you were trying to leave.
Isn't an all-in-one tool just going to be mediocre at everything?
That is the correct objection and we take it seriously — it is the loudest complaint in our research about the incumbent. Our answer is that we are not integrating six product categories. We are joining four steps that are currently four tools with gaps between them: scope, approval, hours, invoice. Your ads manager, Figma, Canva, Slack and accounting system are not replaced, and the list of things we refuse to build is published above.
What does it cost?
Price is set per deal, because the first deployments include custom alterations for the agency in question. What we will commit to publicly is the model: flat per agency, unlimited seats, never per user. Every per-seat competitor draws the same complaint — that part-timers and freelancers who only fill in timesheets make the bill grow faster than the margin. There is also no usage-metered billing stacked on top of the agreed figure. The meeting is where the number gets discussed against your actual client count.
Will my team actually log their time?
This is the risk that kills tools like this, and we would rather name it than skip it. There are four logging paths — a timer, mobile, bulk weekly entry, and one-line Telegram messages — and the burn-down is designed to be worth logging for. If your designers will not log time in any form, the honest answer is that the margin features will not work for you, and we would tell you that in the meeting rather than after the invoice.
Where does my data live, and who can see it?
Data is held in a single Postgres database with a tenant identifier on every row, enforced at the repository layer rather than trusted to individual queries, and a cross-tenant leakage test suite runs as a release gate. Passwords are hashed with argon2id, and staff accounts carry TOTP. Client portal contacts get magic-link access scoped to their own approvals and reports — they never see margin, capacity, or any other client. Every agent action writes to an append-only audit log.
Do you use my client data to train AI models?
No. The AI features read your data to answer your questions and draft your reports. Your data is not used to train models, and it is not pooled across tenants. The AI is also pointed at operations rather than creative — it will not generate your client's content, by design.
Does it handle GST and UAE VAT?
Yes. Tax mode is set per tenant by country — GST for India, 5% VAT for the UAE — and invoices are generated accordingly. Both markets are in scope from the start rather than one being retrofitted.
Can I get my data out?
Yes, in full, in a machine-readable form, without asking us for a favour. Import works the same way in reverse: your existing spreadsheet is the starting point, with guided column mapping, a dry-run preview before anything commits, and an undo on every import.
When can I use it?
It is in development. The retainer and request ledger — the part that closes the leak — is the second build phase, not a later one, because it is the reason an agency would switch. An early agency can be usefully live well before the full SaaS layer is finished. Exact timing depends on what the first design partners need, which is what the meeting is for.
Book a meeting
Take one retainer. Add up the hours you delivered against the hours you scoped.
If the two numbers match, you do not need this. If they do not, that gap is the conversation — thirty minutes, your book, no deck.
- Format
- 30 minutes
- Markets
- India · UAE
- Timezones
- IST · GST
- Work weeks
- Mon–Fri · Sun–Thu