External-client workspaces
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An external-client workspace is one you run on behalf of someone outside your organisation. Where an ordinary internal workspace shares your org’s pooled billing and branding, an external-client workspace:
- names a data owner (the client),
- bills on its own,
- auto-invites the data owner as a free observer, and
- can be whitelabelled with the client’s own logo.
Create one whenever the data really belongs to the client - a municipality’s citizen panels, a client you’ll bill separately, work you expect to hand over once it’s done. For work that’s for your own organisation, create an ordinary internal workspace instead. You’ll need to be a workspace owner or admin inside a partner org.
Creating one - the data-owner step#
When you create a workspace as a partner, mark it as belonging to an external client. That asks for three things:
- Client / data-owner organisation name - who the data belongs to.
- Data-owner email - the person at the client who owns the data. This is the address that gets auto-invited as a free observer, and the one dembrane uses to recognise the data owner in workspace lists.
- Partner-agreement checkbox - you confirm the partner agreement for this engagement, and dembrane records the moment you tick it.
On submit, dembrane marks the workspace as external-client, gives it its own billing account, and auto-invites the data owner as a free observer.
Tip
Get the data-owner email right. It decides who's invited as the observer and lets dembrane show that person a “you are the data owner” marker in their workspace list - a small, privacy-respecting touch that reassures the client the data is theirs.
Separate billing#
An external-client workspace gets its own billing account rather than drawing on your org’s pool. That’s the point: each client’s usage and spend stays cleanly apart from yours and from every other client, and it makes a clean handoff possible later. For what’s metered and how seats count, see tiers & billing.
Note
The free observer doesn't take a seat, so auto-inviting the data owner costs nothing. Paid roles - including external collaborators - do count towards the workspace’s own bill.
The auto-invited free observer#
Every external-client workspace starts with the data owner already invited as a free, read-only observer. They can open projects, read conversations and view reports - and nothing more (no chat, generate, edit or invite). The client can see their own data being handled from day one, without you having to remember to add them and without it costing a seat. When they need to do more, an admin upgrades them from observer to external.
The observer role only exists here - internal workspaces reject observer invites. Full details in observer & external collaborators.
Whitelabel#
External-client workspaces can be whitelabelled - given the client’s own logo in place of the inherited branding. This is external-only; internal workspaces inherit your org’s branding. It makes the workspace feel like the client’s own, which matters when participants record into it and when the client eventually takes it over.
Note
Whitelabel arrives with a Changemaker workspace or above. See tiers & billing for what each plan unlocks.
Related#
- Data ownership & compliance - internal versus external workspaces and who owns the data.
- Data ownership & handoff - naming a data owner and handing the workspace over.
- Observer & external collaborators - the free and paid client roles.
- Becoming a partner - you need partner status to create these.
- Tiers & billing - seats, metering, whitelabel gating.
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