LynxRiseGet lifetime access

About LynxRise · Founded 2026

We build one thing, and we build it in the open.

LynxRise is a client portal for small agencies and independent studios — one link where a client finds their project, files, approvals and invoices instead of six tools and a lost email thread. Four people, no investors, no side products.

What we are building next How we make money

4 people, fully remoteBootstrapped — no outside capital

0 Uptime, trailing 6 months Measured by an external monitor. Two incidents, both published in full.
median First reply to support Weekdays, 09:00–18:00 UK. Answered by the people who write the code.
0 Releases shipped in 6 months Every one logged with a date on the roadmap page.

These four numbers are the ones we would want to see before trusting a small company with client relationships, so they are the ones we publish. They are refreshed on the first working day of each quarter.

1 Origin

It started as an apology for a spreadsheet.

LynxRise came out of a five-person branding studio, not a startup accelerator. We were the ones sending clients a weekly status email, digging out an invoice from an accounting tool, and re-uploading a logo file because the last link had expired.

The first version was a stopgap for our own clients. It worked well enough that other studios asked to use it, and that is the only reason it became a product.

The spreadsheet years

A studio tracking 14 clients across a shared sheet, a drive folder and two inboxes. Roughly a day a week disappeared into status updates and chasing approvals.

Outcome: we counted the hours, and the number was embarrassing.

First portal, one client

A single page per client showing current stage, files awaiting approval and the outstanding invoice. Built in three weeks, ugly, and immediately useful.

Outcome: status emails dropped from weekly to almost never.

Nine studios, and our first hard no

Early users asked for a full CRM with pipelines and lead scoring. We said no and wrote down why: we would rather be the best client-facing layer than a mediocre everything tool.

Outcome: the scope rule that still governs the roadmap.

Private beta mistakes

Opened private beta sign-ups. Four months later a migration locked some users out of file previews for nine hours. We published the timeline, the cause and the fix the same week.

Outcome: incident reports became a standing habit, not a crisis response.

Public launch & Break-even

We rebranded to LynxRise, launched publicly, and immediately hit break-even. We chose to keep the team small rather than raise and grow into a headcount we would have to defend.

Outcome: profitable, slow, and answerable only to customers.

Depth, not surface area

We fully shipped recurring billing and a public API — finishing the things a portal genuinely needs rather than just adding new sections to the sidebar.

Outcome: the roadmap you can read in full, dropped items included.

2 How we decide

Six rules, and what each one costs us.

Principles are cheap when they are free. Each of these has cost us revenue, a feature request, or a customer — so we have written the price next to it. Hover or focus a card to see it.

Rule 01

Your client is the real user

Every decision is judged by whether a non-technical client can complete a task without being taught. If it needs an onboarding call, it is not finished.

What it costs: we have rejected power-user features that would have shipped in a week, because they added a second way to do the same thing.

Rule 02

Your data leaves as easily as it arrives

Full export in open formats, on any plan, without asking us. Lock-in should never be the reason a customer stays.

What it costs: a measurable number of cancellations we could have slowed down with friction. We would rather they leave cleanly and come back.

Rule 03

Say no in public

Declined requests are listed on the roadmap with a reason, including the ones we later reversed. A silent backlog is a way of avoiding the conversation.

What it costs: we lose deals to tools that say yes to everything on a sales call. We keep the customers who read the reason.

Rule 04

Support is engineering

There is no support tier between you and the people who wrote the feature. The person answering can usually fix it.

What it costs: roughly a fifth of engineering time each week, and slower shipping in busy months.

Rule 05

Small on purpose

Four people, no outside capital. We grow the team only when support quality or delivery pace actually demands it.

What it costs: features arrive in quarters, not weeks. We publish which quarter, and we say so when it slips.

Rule 06

No surprises in billing

Flat pricing, client seats never charged, and any increase announced with months of notice and a locked rate for existing customers.

What it costs: we leave money on the table with agencies that would happily pay per client seat.

Each card reveals the trade-off on hover or keyboard focus.

3 How we work

A steady cadence beats a big reveal.

We ship small and often, in a two-week rhythm, with every release written down. The chart is our actual release count by month over the last year — including the two quiet months around the file-storage rewrite.

Releases per month

Jul 2025DecJun 2026

The dip in Nov–Dec 2025 is the storage rewrite — three weeks with nothing user-visible to show. We said so at the time rather than shipping filler.

1
Requests land in one place

Support threads, roadmap votes and calls all become a single item with the original wording attached.

2
We look for the pattern, not the feature

Five people asking for a Gantt chart usually means one problem about deadlines. We solve the problem.

3
Build in two-week slices

Anything larger is cut into shippable pieces. If a slice cannot ship on its own, the plan is wrong.

4
Ship behind a flag, then widen

New surfaces go to volunteers first, then everyone, with a changelog entry either way.

5
Write down what happened

Shipped, delayed or dropped — it goes on the roadmap with a date. That is the whole accountability mechanism.

4 The team

Four people, and you can reach all of them.

No sales team, no offshore support desk, no growth department. Everyone here has answered a support ticket this month, which is deliberate — it is the fastest way to keep the product honest.

SH
ShahbanCo-founder

Ran the studio LynxRise came out of. Writes the roadmap and most of the words you read in the app.

Also answers billing email
BO
BorhanCo-founder, Engineering

Built the first portal in three weeks. Owns the data model, permissions and anything that touches a client's files.

On call for incidents
SH
ShipinEngineer, Interface

Responsible for the client-side experience - the pages your clients see, on the phones they actually use.

Runs accessibility reviews
MA
MaishaSupport & Onboarding

First reply on most tickets, and the person who migrates your existing client list in when you switch.

Writes the docs

5 The business

Where the money comes from, plainly.

A tool that holds your client relationships should tell you how it stays alive. We are funded by customers paying for software — nothing else — and that is the whole model.

Revenue by source, H1 2026

Monthly subscriptions54%
Annual subscriptions29%
Lifetime licences13%
Paid migration help4%
Why this matters: no single customer is more than 2% of revenue, and no advertiser or data broker appears anywhere in this chart. If we make a bad product decision, the only people who can punish us are the people using it.
Profitable since our 2025 private beta

We sold it to other agencies before launching publicly. Revenue covers salaries, so we aren't spending someone else's runway to buy your signup.

12 months of costs in reserve

Held in cash, deliberately. It is what lets us say no to a bad deal and keep honouring old pricing.

Lifetime licences are honoured as sold

Every feature listed in a deal's tier ships to that tier. New paid add-ons, if they ever exist, will be named as such before purchase.

No venture capital, no acquisition talks

If that ever changes we will say so on this page before it completes, not in a farewell blog post afterwards.

We do not sell or train on your data

Your content is not used to train models and is never shared with advertisers. The full list of sub-processors is on the privacy page.

6 Honest fit

Who this is for — and who should skip it.

The fastest way to waste your evaluation time is to be sold to. Here is the version we would give you on a call, before you spend a licence on us.

A good fit

  • Agencies and studios of 2–25 people handing work to clients repeatedly, with approvals and invoices attached.
  • Freelancers who want to look established — branded portal on your own domain, no LynxRise logo in front of your client.
  • Anyone drowning in status requests, where the real product is a client who can answer their own question.
  • Teams that value a written roadmap over a feature list, and can wait a quarter for the right version of something.

A poor fit

  • You need a full CRM or sales pipeline. We deliberately do not build lead management, and we will not start.
  • You need deep internal project management — dependencies, resourcing, timesheets. We are client-facing by design.
  • You need on-premise hosting or a signed enterprise MSA today. We are a hosted product with standard terms.
  • You want every request built on request. We publish reasons for declining, which is worse than a yes if you needed a yes.

7 Straight answers

The questions a careful reviewer should ask.

Mostly asked by people evaluating a lifetime deal, and fair every time. Nothing here is hedged.

You would get 90 days' notice by email and in the app, full export of every workspace in open formats, and the portal would stay readable for clients throughout that window. We keep 12 months of operating costs in reserve specifically so that this would be an orderly wind-down rather than a sudden one.

Do not trust the team size — check the evidence. Uptime is measured by an external monitor and published. Incidents get written timelines, including the nine-hour file-preview outage in 2025. Every release for the last year is dated on the roadmap, dropped features included. Export is one click on every plan, so the cost of being wrong about us is low.

No. Anything listed in your tier at purchase stays in your tier, including the roadmap items named for that tier. If we ever build a genuinely separate product line, it would be sold as a new product and named clearly — not carved out of what you already bought. This is written into the terms, not just this page.

No. Your content is not used to train any model, ours or a third party's. Where an AI feature exists, it is opt-in per workspace, the provider is named in the sub-processor list, and it can be switched off without losing anything else.

Frequency, then depth, then fit with the scope rule. A request that appears often, blocks a client-facing task, and belongs in a portal wins. A request that would turn us into a CRM loses, no matter how often it appears. Both outcomes are published on the roadmap with the reason attached.

We are not in conversations and are not seeking them. If that ever changes, we will post it on this page and email customers before anything completes, and the export and notice commitments above would carry over as a condition. We would rather lose a deal than surprise 2,000 workspaces.

There is no native mobile app — the client portal is responsive web. Native mobile and a full CRM (lead scoring, sales pipelines) are both on the "later or never" part of our public roadmap, and we say which is which. (Our Public REST API, webhooks, and recurring retainers are fully shipped and live today.)

Want the unpolished version?

Ask us anything before you commit a licence — pricing edge cases, roadmap doubts, migration from whatever you use now. Shahban or Maisha will answer, usually the same working day.

Email hello@updates.lynxrise.com