Executive Summary

Many service and project-driven businesses—agencies, consultancies, design shops and their clients—are currently stuck between giving clients full access to project management tools or chasing endless status meetings and screenshots; the pain is that clients need live visibility but vendors fear accidental edits, IP leaks, and inflated seat costs. This problem affects an addressable base of roughly 4 million such businesses and underlies a $12.0B market (estimated at $3K ACV per business), so it is material for sellers and buyers alike. A viable product would provide "fair guest" access to PM tools: role-limited write permissions, configurable scopes (comments-only, task-creation, approval gates), per-guest usage billing instead of seat licensing, and AI-assisted moderation that redacts or summarizes sensitive content automatically. Buyers would get lower friction collaboration and predictable costs; vendors gain controlled transparency and monetizable guest access. Timing is favorable because clients increasingly demand live progress and fewer status meetings, buyers are shifting away from seat-based pricing toward usage- or outcome-based models, and advances in AI make safe, automated moderation plausible; given a Market Score of 88/100 and Revenue Potential of 80/100, the commercial opportunity is real. The product can stand out by combining enterprise-grade security and simple connectors to major PM platforms with a clear usage-billing model, but execution risks include complex integrations with varied APIs, convincing procurement teams to change billing models, and proving the AI moderation is robust enough for legal and compliance requirements in diverse industries.

Market Opportunity

Fair client guest access for PM tools — limited write roles & usage billing targets a $12.0B = 4M service & project-driven businesses x $3K ACV total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 10-15% CAGR in collaboration/PM SaaS.

Key trends driving demand: Client-facing transparency -- clients demand live progress and fewer status meetings, increasing need for safe client access.; Shift away from seat-based pricing -- buyers prefer usage- or outcome-based billing for intermittent collaborators.; AI-assisted moderation -- automated redaction/summarization enables safer, lower-friction client collaboration.; Composability of SaaS -- billing, RBAC, and storage APIs allow rapid implementation of tiered guest roles..

Key competitors include Atlassian (Trello/Jira), Asana, ClickUp, monday.com.

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Fair client guest access for PM tools — limited write roles & usage billing

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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