About Packaged
We built this because we needed it
For the best part of a decade I have run a marketing and creative agency. Retainers, project work, a roster of clients who all needed something slightly different. Good people, good work, and underneath it the same handful of problems every single month — the kind nobody puts on a job description and everybody ends up doing.
I felt those problems one way, sitting where the cash flow lands. The people doing the work felt them another way entirely — as the thing that kept interrupting the job they were actually hired for. Watching that, more than my own frustration, is what eventually made me build something.
What “chasing payment” actually meant
Not one polite reminder.
First
An invoice emailed and never acknowledged.
Then
A phone call that went unanswered, then another that got “I’ll sort it this week”.
Then
A WhatsApp message a week later, because that is the one channel people actually read — and now you are asking a client for money in the same thread where you send the work.
Multiply that by a roster. Somebody on my team was spending real hours every month on it, and it was the part of the job they hated most: the awkwardness of asking, the repetition of asking again, and the strange position of being the person who nags a client they are also trying to do good work for.
And when none of it worked, the only real lever left was to stop working. Telling a client their service is paused until they settle is a conversation that costs you something even when you are completely in the right — so we put it off, and put it off, and mostly never had it at all. Which taught everybody the quiet lesson that our payment terms were a suggestion.
What it did to the business
Income you cannot plan around
The work was steady. The money was not. Two clients paying late in the same month is the difference between a comfortable one and a tense one, and you only find out which you are having partway through it. You end up making decisions — a hire, a piece of equipment, a bigger office — later and smaller than you should, because you cannot see far enough ahead to commit.
Scope that grows while the price stands still
“Just one more small thing.” Individually reasonable, every time. Collectively, a retainer that quietly doubled in effort and never once moved in value. Saying no costs a conversation nobody wants with a client who pays monthly, so my team did the extra work and I found out later, and neither of us felt good about it.
Admin taking the hours the work needed
Client messages scattered across email, WhatsApp and DMs, so answering a simple question meant searching three places. Files sent as attachments and asked for again months later. The same question answered for the fifth time because there was nowhere to send someone to look it up. None of it difficult. All of it landing on the people who should have been designing.
Work that got forgotten
We would finish a strong month, and at renewal the client would have no real picture of what they had received. Every renewal turned into a fresh justification of a price we had already agreed — and when you are re-selling, you discount. I know for a fact we undercharged for years partly because we could not easily show what a month of us actually contained.
And what it did to us
The business ran when we were in it and stopped when we were not. That sounds like a scaling problem. It is really a life problem. It means the end of the month is stressful whether or not the work went well. It means a Sunday evening spent working out who owes what. It means checking a phone at dinner because a client sent something to a personal number, and answering, because the alternative is it getting lost.
I could not properly step away, and I was not the only one. Taking leave meant handing someone a mental map of who was mid-project, who had been chased and who had not, which is not a handover so much as an apology. We turned down work in months where we had the skill and not the headroom, because the coordination cost of one more client was higher than the work itself.
None of that is a software problem, exactly. But almost all of it came from running a real business on tools that were never built for one.
Everything we tried first
We started where everyone starts.
A spreadsheet of who owed what
Accurate exactly as long as somebody kept it up, and quietly stopped being true the first busy week.
Calendar reminders to chase people
Which we snoozed.
A shared drive
With a folder structure that made sense to whoever built it and nobody else.
Then software. Several times.
An invoicing tool that had no idea what a retainer was. A project tool our clients would not log into. A CRM that solved the part we were least bothered by. Each one fixed a slice and none of them spoke to each other, so we ended up doing the joining by hand — which is how you acquire a tool that costs money and creates admin.
Two things none of them handled. They had no concept of the way we actually sell: a package with tiers, a retainer that renews, a project billed in stages, a number of revisions included. We had to describe our work in their vocabulary and it never quite fit. And none of them properly supported our currency, or could take money the way our clients actually pay — a bank transfer, or mobile money — so the collecting always fell back to us regardless of what we were paying for.
Somewhere in there I realised we were solving the wrong half of the problem.
A good part of what we were struggling with was never a tooling problem at all. Paying late is normal here — not malicious, just how a lot of business gets done, and everyone is waiting on someone else. Relationships make you reluctant to enforce anything, because the client who is late this month is the one who referred you two others last year. And some of it is simply how people are: scope creeps because asking costs nothing, and deadlines slip when missing them costs nothing either.
No amount of software fixes that on its own. What was actually missing were policies — decided once, calmly, in advance. We had never written any of them down, so every single instance became a judgement call made by a tired person who did not want the confrontation.
That is the thing worth stealing whether or not you ever use our software: decide the rules while you are calm, tell the client at the start, and then let something other than your goodwill do the enforcing.
So we built the thing that holds the line
Which is why so much of Packaged is policies you set once rather than buttons you press.
What a package includes, and what an extra costs
Decided when you build the package, so nobody has to negotiate it later.
When a reminder goes out, and the one after it
They go whether or not anyone felt like sending them.
What happens if an invoice is still unpaid
The work can pause automatically — a rule everyone agreed to at the start, rather than a confrontation somebody has to find the nerve for.
Flexible Pricing Plans
Choose the tier that best fits your needs.
Basic
A clean, professional 4-page website for small businesses and solopreneurs ready to launch their first online presence.
- Up to 4 pages
- Fully responsive design across devices
- Domain + hosting included for 1 year
- 1 year SSL certificate included
- Pre-made theme customization
- Basic contact forms
Standard
A growth-ready site with premium theme customization, blog integration, and analytics built for businesses scaling online.
- Up to 7 pages
- Everything in Basic, plus:
- Premium theme customization
- Enhanced forms & integrations
- Google Analytics + blog setup
- Priority support
Premium
A fully custom website with bespoke design, advanced tracking, booking tools, and enterprise-grade security for established brands.
- Unlimited pages
- Custom design with mockups
- Enhanced SEO setup
- Booking & automation tools
- Custom CMS integration
- Dedicated support
A service, packaged into tiers — what each one includes, and what it costs, decided once.
I also run a software engineering company. So we built the thing ourselves, at Premier Tech Lab in Accra, for the agency to use. Not as a side project or a pitch deck — as the thing we needed on a Monday morning.
The rest of the details are just as literal. The reminder schedule exists because someone on my team was sending those messages by hand and dreading it. The client portal exists because we were tired of being a file server. Monthly reports exist because good work kept being invisible at exactly the moment it needed to be seen. Every one of them came from a specific person having a specific bad week.
We ran the agency on it for a while before it occurred to us that none of those problems were specific to marketing. An architect billing in stages, a bookkeeper with forty small retainers, a consultancy, an events company — anyone selling a service on a repeating arrangement hits the same wall in the same order. So we opened it up.
What that means for you
It was designed by people who have done your job
Most software for service businesses is built by engineers who have never run one, which is why it makes you describe your work in its language rather than yours. Packaged is shaped around packages, tiers, retainers and milestones because that is how the work is actually sold — and it was shaped by the people doing that selling and that delivery, not just by whoever signed off on it.
It is built by a software company, not assembled from templates
Tools built by service businesses for themselves tend to be fragile, and to stop being maintained the moment a big project lands. This one is built and maintained by engineers whose actual job that is.
It is priced for where it was built
Packaged starts at ten dollars a month, and the pricing page shows you what that is in cedis and naira. That is not a discount or a promotion — it is what we think it is worth to a business our size.
Your clients pay you the way they already pay
Card, bank transfer or mobile money, in your currency, into your own payment account. This is the part almost nothing else got right for us, and it is the difference between software that collects on your behalf and software that hands the collecting back to you.
There is a free plan that does not expire
One client, end to end, for as long as you like. If it does not fit the way you work, you will find that out without paying us anything.
Not sure it fits?
There is a short set of questions that will tell you honestly whether Packaged suits how you work — including when it does not. It takes about two minutes and does not ask for a card.