Most agency dashboards make inviting a client feel heavier than it should be. Spin up an account on their behalf, copy a temporary password, hope they reset it before the link rots. FlowEngine takes the email-as-key path: drop in your client's email, pick who pays for the hosting, click Send Invite. They get one link, open the portal, and start seeing their workflows under your branding.
This guide walks the whole flow end-to-end with real screenshots. About five minutes once you have done it once.
What an invite actually does
An invite in FlowEngine is two things at once: it grants portal access to your client, and it pre-decides what they see and pay for once they log in. There is no "create account, then assign permissions" two-step. The choices you make in the invite modal lock in the relationship.
Two main flows, picked with a tab in the modal:
- You Pay. The client gets read-only or read-write access to instances and services you already own and bill. Useful when you run the n8n instances and the client just needs visibility.
- Ask Client to Pay. The client signs up, picks monthly or annual, and FlowEngine bills their card directly. Useful when you want hosting costs off your books.
Either way, the result is the same kind of access link in their inbox. The difference is who is on the hook for the monthly bill.
Before you start
- You are on the Max plan (the tier that unlocks client management). The free and individual paid tiers can use FlowEngine for their own workflows but cannot invite clients.
- You have at least one active instance or service if you plan to use the You Pay flow. If not, the Ask Client to Pay flow works fine on its own.
- Your client's email address. That is the only required field.
Want your invitation emails to come from your own domain rather than a FlowEngine address? Set up Custom Email first. The white-label guide covers that in ten minutes.
Step 1: Open the Clients page
Click Clients in the sidebar. If you have not invited anyone yet, you land on an empty state with one CTA.
The Clients tab is also the dashboard you come back to later. Each invited client shows up here with their status (pending, active, inactive), their linked instances, and a quick-jump to their detail page. For now, click Invite Client.
Step 2: Fill out the invite modal
The modal opens with two fields and a tab switcher.
Three things to fill in:
- Client name (optional). Use the company name, not the contact's first name. It shows up in the sidebar list and email subject line. Skip if you do not have it yet.
- Client email. Required. The invite link goes here. Make sure it is the email the client actually checks.
- Payer tab. You Pay or Ask Client to Pay. Pick the one that matches your billing arrangement.
Step 3a: You Pay flow
If you keep paying for hosting and just want the client to see their workflows, stay on the You Pay tab. Two optional sections appear depending on what you have provisioned:
- Link Instances. A checkbox list of every active n8n instance under your account. Tick the ones this client should see. You can link more than one if a single client has staging plus production.
- Link Services. Same idea for WhatsApp services, Hermes agents, and other non-n8n services. Tick the ones to share.
If you do not link anything, the client still gets portal access but only sees the empty state. They can be granted access later from their detail page. Most agencies link at least one instance up front so the client immediately has something to look at.
Step 3b: Ask Client to Pay flow
If the client should pay for their own hosting, switch to the Ask Client to Pay tab.
Two add-ons:
- n8n Hosting. Provisions a fresh n8n instance under the client's account. Pick a starting storage size: 10 GB, 30 GB, or 50 GB. The 30 GB tier is the most common for agencies; 10 GB is fine for early trials. The client picks monthly or annual when they accept the invite.
- WhatsApp Service. If the client needs their own WhatsApp connection, tick this. They pay for it as part of the same checkout.
Skip both checkboxes and the client gets free portal access only. That is useful when you want a client to log in and see status on services that live elsewhere, with no payment step.
Click Send Invite when the form is ready. FlowEngine generates a unique invite token, ties it to the configuration you picked, and emails the link to the client. If the email fails to send (bad address, bounced inbox), the invite is rolled back and you see the error inline.
Step 4: What the client sees
The client gets an email from your agency (or from FlowEngine if you have not set up Custom Email yet) with a single Accept Invitation link. The link goes to one of two places depending on the flow:
- You Pay or portal-only. The link drops them straight on the portal. They sign in, see your branding, and the linked instances and services already populate their dashboard.
- Ask Client to Pay with hosting. The link goes to a confirmation page where they pick monthly or annual and complete checkout. Once payment clears, the n8n instance provisions in about thirty seconds and the client lands on their portal.
Either way, the client never sees a temporary password. Email is the credential. They authenticate with the same provider they use for everything else.
Step 5: Track and re-send
Back on your Clients page, every invite shows up immediately. Pending ones get a yellow banner on the client's detail page reading Invite pending - This client has not yet accepted their invitation. Active ones get a green badge.
If a client claims they never got the email, head to their detail page and check the spam-folder note in the banner. The most common cause is your sender domain has no SPF or DKIM record. Setting up Custom Email with a transactional provider that signs your messages fixes this in one pass.
You can also revoke a pending invite from the same page. Click the client, scroll to the danger zone, and the cancel action removes the invite token so the link in their inbox stops working.
Common mistakes
- Wrong payer tab. If you sent a "You Pay" invite to a client who was supposed to pay themselves, cancel the invite and re-send on the correct tab. Switching mid-flow is not supported because billing is part of the invite contract.
- Linked an instance that is not running. Active and running instances appear in Link Instances; instances stuck in pending_deploy do not. Finish the deploy first, then invite.
- Hit the rate limit. FlowEngine caps invites at ten per hour per account to stop abuse. If you are onboarding a batch, space them out or wait an hour. The error message says exactly that.
- Used a personal email instead of the work email. Once a client accepts on a given email, you cannot transfer the relationship to a different one without canceling and re-inviting. Always confirm the email up front.
Why this flow is shaped like this
Two design choices worth naming. First, the invite is the first billing decision rather than something to configure later. That is on purpose: agency relationships almost always go sideways because billing was not nailed down on day one. Forcing the choice up front makes the rest of the dashboard cleaner.
Second, FlowEngine refuses to create accounts on the client's behalf. The client owns their email, the client clicks the link, the client is the legal account holder. That keeps the agency-client relationship clean if either side leaves: nobody is fighting over who controls the login.
Try it
If you are already running client work on FlowEngine, the next invite is one trip through this modal. Open Clients, click Invite Client, drop in their email, pick the payer tab, send. Five minutes from idea to "client logging in for the first time."
If you are not on FlowEngine yet, the agency tier is where client management lives. Check the pricing page for the current tier breakdown, or sign in at flowengine.cloud and try the invite flow on a sandbox client first.