Most agencies are quietly rubbish at client reporting.
I should know. For years I was one of them. Sites would be ticking along nicely; plugins updated, backups running, no fires, and the client would hear absolutely nothing from me unless something broke. Which is a great way to make a monthly retainer feel like a charity donation.
The annoying part is I always knew the answer. Send a monthly report. Show the work. Keep clients in the loop. Every agency thread on every platform says the same thing.
But every reporting tool I tried fell into one of two camps. Either it was a sprawling marketing-analytics platform that wanted £199 a month and 47 integrations I’d never use, or it was a WordPress-only plugin that had no idea the Shopify and Astro sites on my client list existed.
So I did the developer thing. I built it myself.
Side note, I do still use MainWP to manage my WordPress client websites. It’s awesome and I’d highly recommend it to other agencies with WP clients.. But it’s a full website management tool and the reporting is bolted on.
What SendTidings actually is
SendTidings is a reporting tool for web agencies and freelance developers. It pulls data from your client sites: performance, uptime (coming soon), SEO, and sends a clean, branded report to your client every month. No client dashboard, no link for them to forget about. Just an email that lands in their inbox saying “here’s how the site’s doing.”
It works across stacks. WordPress, Shopify, Astro, Next.js, plain HTML: same tool, same report format. Because most agencies I know don’t only build on one platform, and the tools they currently use politely pretend that’s not the case.
The SendTidings homepage on a macbook.
Who it’s for
If you run an agency or you’re a freelancer with a handful of client sites on retainer, this is for you. Especially if:
- You’ve been meaning to set up automated reports for two years and never quite got round to it
- You’re paying for a reporting tool you barely use
- You build on more than one platform and resent juggling reporting tools
- You’re tired of the giant “marketing analytics dashboard” energy and just want something that does the job
It’s not for in-house marketing teams running paid campaigns. There are good tools for that (Swydo, AgencyAnalytics, DashThis) and SendTidings doesn’t try to compete with them. You can comfortably use both.
A few decisions I made early on
Free tier with real value. One site, monthly reports, all data sources, no card required. If you can’t get value from that, you won’t get value from the paid tiers either.
Branded reports as the default on paid plans. The Starter plan strips the SendTidings logo from your client emails. Your clients see your brand, not mine. Reporting tools that splash their own logo across the client’s monthly summary have always struck me as a bit cheeky.
No dashboard for clients. Clients don’t want another login. They want an email they can read on their phone over coffee.
Open source on the way. The plan is to release a self-hostable version under AGPL-3.0. It’s not live yet… I want to be sure the project’s stable before opening up the maintenance commitment that comes with OSS. There’s a waitlist on the site if you want a nudge when it lands.
What’s next
The marketing site is live, the app is running, and I’m slowly loading my own client sites into it. Which means real reports going out to real clients, tested properly before I encourage anyone else to use it.
If you want a poke around, sendtidings.com. The free tier is genuinely free, and setup takes about five minutes per site.
And if you’ve also been quietly rubbish at client reporting for the last decade, same. Welcome to the club.
Josh Cox
I'm Josh — I build, host and look after WordPress sites (and increasingly fast Astro / Next.js builds) for Oxfordshire businesses, from Didcot, since 2016. I also tinker with a few products of my own on the side.
