The Agency Guide to Branded Links for Clients

Every agency handles client links, and almost every agency handles them badly. The typical arrangement is one vendor account containing thirty clients' campaigns, a password shared across the team, a domain that belongs to nobody in particular, and a monthly subscription buried in the operations budget where nobody bills it to anyone. It works until it does not. This guide covers the three operating models available, the pricing math behind each, and how to move from absorbing link costs to charging for link infrastructure as a product line.

Why Client Links Are an Agency Problem

Short links sit in an awkward place. They are too small to justify a project, too visible to ignore, and too operationally entangled to hand back to the client.

They show up in every deliverable. Paid social, SMS campaigns, printed materials with QR codes, influencer briefs, email footers, affiliate placements: each one needs a trackable link, and each one is published somewhere you cannot edit after the fact. That last property is what makes the arrangement fragile. A link printed on packaging or embedded in a scheduled campaign has to keep resolving for years, long after the campaign, and possibly long after the client relationship.

There is also an attribution problem. Clients ask which channel drove results, and the answer depends on links being consistently tagged, consistently owned and consistently measured. When links are created ad hoc by three different people in two different tools, the reporting is a reconstruction rather than a measurement.

And there is a positioning problem. A short link is the most visible piece of infrastructure in a campaign, appearing in every share, and it currently reads as some other company's domain.

The Three Operating Models

Agencies handle this one of three ways. They differ in operational risk and in which direction the money flows.

One shared vendor account

The default. The agency holds a single subscription, creates links for every client inside it, and expenses the subscription or folds it into a retainer.

It is fast and cheap at small scale, and it stops working at around five clients. Everything lives in one namespace with no separation, so anyone with the login sees every client's campaigns. Reporting means filtering by naming convention, which holds until someone forgets the convention. The real exposure is the shared domain: short links attract phishing, and if one client's link is abused and the domain gets flagged by browser safety programs, every client's links break simultaneously. Explaining that outage to thirty clients at once is a bad afternoon.

Workspaces under an agency plan

Better. Several vendors offer workspace or sub-account features that separate each client's links, users and reports inside one agency subscription.

The data separation is real and the reporting improves immediately. What does not change is the billing direction: the agency pays the vendor for the privilege of having clients. As of August 2026, Replug's Agency tier costs 99 USD per month (79 USD on annual billing) and includes ten client workspaces, with each additional workspace costing roughly 8 to 10 USD per month and adding 25,000 clicks, five domains and one user. Rebrandly offers workspaces from its Professional tier without isolating billing. In both cases, growth is a cost.

White-label resale under your brand

The third model inverts the flow. The platform runs under your brand on your domain, each client gets an account on plans you define at prices you set, and clients pay you directly — card checkout on your own Stripe, subscriptions on your own PayPal, or any payment method you offer as a link. The underlying vendor takes 0% of that revenue and stays invisible. The mechanics are covered in detail in our explanation of white-label link shorteners.

This is rare. Reviewing more than twenty vendors in the category, we found no mainstream platform that lets a partner sell subscriptions to their own customers and keep the revenue. Replug's Agency tier delivers genuine dashboard branding, including your own dashboard domain, logo, favicon, login page, SMTP server and branded reports, and stops short of reseller billing.

| Dimension | Shared account | Agency workspaces | White-label resale | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Client data separation | None | Yes | Yes | | Whose brand clients see | Vendor's | Vendor's | Yours | | Who pays per client | Agency | Agency | Client pays agency | | Client login | None | Sometimes | Yes, on your domain | | Effect of adding a client | Clutter | Higher cost | Higher revenue | | Practical ceiling | About 5 clients | Cost-bound | Revenue-bound |

What Changes When Clients Pay You

The difference between the second and third model is not branding. It is which side of the ledger your client list sits on.

Consider an agency with twenty clients. Under the workspace model at current Agency-tier pricing, the base subscription covers ten workspaces and the other ten cost roughly 8 to 10 USD each, so the monthly cost lands near 190 USD, generating no revenue because the cost is absorbed into retainers. Under the reseller model with the same twenty clients on a 29 USD plan, gross revenue is 580 USD per month, all of it paid directly to you; on LinkProfit's Growth plan at 149 USD with 0% commission, that leaves roughly 431 USD per month before card processing fees.

| Model | 20 clients, monthly cost | 20 clients, monthly revenue | Net position | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Agency workspaces | About 190 USD | 0 USD | Minus 190 USD | | White-label resale | 149 USD platform, 0% commission | 580 USD | Plus 431 USD |

The swing is over 600 USD per month on the same client list doing the same work. Scale it and the gap widens, because the workspace model charges per client while the reseller subscription stays flat: LinkProfit is 49 USD for 25 client workspaces on Starter, 149 USD for 80 on Growth, 399 USD for 250 on Scale, Enterprise by contract — with 0% commission everywhere and 20 percent off annual billing. The pricing page has the complete grid.

There is a second effect that matters more than the money. A client paying a monthly subscription for a tool that carries your logo, holds two years of their campaign history and hosts links printed on their materials is substantially harder to replace than an agency billing project fees. The switching cost is real and it belongs to you.

Setting It Up

The configuration is DNS work and pricing decisions, not development.

Domains

You need one domain for your dashboard, typically a subdomain such as links.youragency.com, and one redirect domain per client. Client domains should belong to the client: go.clientbrand.com outperforms an agency-owned domain on click-through because recipients recognize the destination, and it isolates each client from every other client's reputation problems.

Each client domain needs a CNAME record for a subdomain, or an A record when the client insists on an apex domain, plus a TXT record proving ownership. Certificates are issued and renewed automatically when validation is delegated properly. Write down who controls each DNS record, because that person controls whether the links keep working.

Plan structure

Define three tiers rather than one price. A ladder around 19, 29 and 49 USD per month covers the range from a single-brand client to one running multiple regional domains and a large team. Set limits that reflect real usage: link counts, tracked clicks, domains and seats. Clients on the low tier upgrade themselves when a campaign outgrows the limits, which is the point of having tiers.

Keep an internal plan for clients whose link work is genuinely part of a larger retainer, so the service is still provisioned, still branded and still measured, even where you have chosen not to bill it separately.

Onboarding

Standardize it once. A short DNS instruction sheet for the client's technical contact, an invitation email from your domain, a fifteen-minute walkthrough call, and a template set of UTM conventions so the reporting is consistent from the first link. The agency solutions page covers the workflow end to end, and the mechanics of client-side DNS setup are in our custom domain guide.

Pricing the Service

Two pricing questions come up, and both have straightforward answers.

What do I charge? Between 19 and 49 USD per month per client. That range sits alongside what the client would pay a mainstream vendor directly, which makes it easy to justify, and it includes things the vendor does not provide: setup, domain management, reporting conventions and someone who answers when a link breaks. Below 19 USD the line item is too small to survive a budget review, which is worse than being slightly expensive.

Do I mark up or bundle? Bill separately, even inside a retainer relationship. A separate line renews on its own schedule, survives changes in project scope, and gives you recurring revenue that does not depend on winning the next project. Bundled costs get cut during renegotiation precisely because nobody can see what they buy.

For clients who resist a recurring fee, offer annual billing at a discount. It converts a monthly decision into a yearly one and improves your cash position at the start of the relationship.

Selling It to Existing Clients

The pitch to a current client is not about link shortening. It is about three things they already care about.

Ownership comes first: their links, on their domain, with history they keep. Second is measurement, since consistent tagging across every channel is what makes the monthly report trustworthy rather than approximate. Third is continuity, because a link on a printed brochure or a scheduled campaign has to resolve for years, and right now it resolves through a personal account of someone on your team.

Lead with a migration rather than a purchase. Export their existing links, import them with identical slugs, repoint the domain, verify a sample, and show them the first week of clean analytics. A working thing they can see converts far better than a proposal describing one.

For prospects rather than existing clients, the branded dashboard is a credibility asset in the pitch itself. Showing a prospect a product with your logo on it changes the conversation about what kind of agency you are.

Operational Realities

Three things will come up eventually, so decide them now.

Offboarding. Write into the contract that a departing client can take their domain and receive an export of links and click history. Links on a client-owned domain keep working after they repoint DNS, which is the only defensible arrangement.

Abuse. Short links attract phishing whether or not your clients are careful, since anyone can create a lookalike. Know how reports reach you, how quickly a link can be disabled, and who owns that response. Per-client domains contain the blast radius when it happens.

Support expectations. You are now the vendor in the client's eyes. Set response expectations in writing and do not promise uptime guarantees stronger than the ones your platform gives you.

Where to Start

Count your clients and multiply by 29 USD. If the number is meaningfully larger than a platform subscription, the current arrangement is costing you money every month it continues.

The move itself is small: register a dashboard subdomain, brand it, define three plans, connect payment onboarding, and migrate one client as a pilot. Do that with your most cooperative client, learn what the onboarding actually takes, then run the rest of the roster an hour at a time. The white-label overview includes a calculator for modeling your specific client count, and the agency solutions page walks through the setup in the order you will actually do it.