Adding your agency to a client's Vercel team

Dana at Harbor Fitness wants her new site on Vercel, and Theo at Northside Studio will build and run it. The setup that serves everyone best is simple: Dana owns a Vercel team and invites Theo to it, and he joins with his own login and a role that fits the work. She keeps the bill, the domains and the final say, and Theo can deploy from day one.

Labels below come from Vercel's documentation at the time of writing.

Dana needs a Pro team

Vercel's free Hobby plan is for personal, non-commercial projects, and it has no team members. Under Vercel's fair use guidelines, a site someone is paid to build or host counts as commercial use, so a client site belongs on Pro or Enterprise anyway.

If Dana doesn't have a team yet, she can select Create Team at the bottom of the team switcher, or upgrade under Settings > Billing. A Pro trial is a fine way to start, with two catches: Owners can't be changed during the trial, and if it ends without a payment method, the team reverts to Hobby and its members are removed (Vercel).

Who pays for your seat

On Pro, Dana's team pays for each seat that can deploy, and yours is one of them. Owner, Member and Developer seats are paid, while Viewer seats are free and read-only. One paid seat for the person doing the work is often enough, and teammates who only need to look can take free Viewer seats.

Keep Dana's card current, too. While a Pro team is overdue, Vercel won't let it add team members or redeploy existing projects until the payment goes through (Vercel).

Skip the back and forth. Let one link walk your client through it

The roles that fit an agency

Team roles apply to every project in the team. These are the roles a Pro team can assign:

Security, Contributor and project-level roles are for Enterprise teams.

Member is the practical choice while you set things up. Creating a project and changing production environment variables, such as live API keys, both need Owner or Member unless a Developer has been given extra permissions (Vercel). Developer suits ongoing work once the project exists: it deploys, manages domains and ships to production when you merge to the production branch, but it can't touch production environment variables, team settings or members. Dana can switch you at any time with Manage Role.

After launch, a free Pro Viewer seat lets you see deployments and comment on previews, but not logs or usage data, so keep Developer if you're providing support. Owner stays with Dana. Vercel recommends at least two Owners, so if she wants a backup, a colleague at Harbor Fitness is the natural second.

One link per client, with every step checked. Reserve a founding place

Where the invite lives

Only an Owner can invite. Dana:

1. Selects Harbor Fitness from the team switcher in the Vercel dashboard.
2. Opens Settings in the sidebar and goes to Members.
3. Enters your email, chooses the role and selects Invite. To invite a teammate at the same time, she selects Add more first.

The invite waits under Pending Invitations until you accept it, and it expires after 7 days, so accept it promptly. Full steps: Vercel access, step by step.

Moving a project into Dana's team

If you started the project in Northside Studio's own team, move it across instead of rebuilding. A project transfer runs with zero downtime. You need to be an Owner of the team the project leaves and a member of the team it joins, so accept Dana's invite first. If you'd rather not join her team for the move, Vercel's REST API can create a transfer request that returns a code her team uses to accept it.

1. Open the project, then Settings > General.
2. At the bottom, in the Transfer Project section, click Transfer.
3. Select Harbor Fitness. If that team has no valid payment method, Dana adds one first.
4. Review the domains, aliases and environment variables that will move, then click Transfer.

The move takes seconds to minutes, and Vercel emails you and Dana's Owners when it's done. Deployments, environment variables set in the project, domains and the Git repository link come along. Integrations don't, so add them again, and usage, logs and log drains start fresh.

Check the domains. A project's apex domain moves to the new team, but if the project only uses a subdomain such as www, the root domain stays in your team. To move it, open Domains in your team's sidebar, choose Move from the domain's menu and pick Harbor Fitness (Vercel). A domain bought through Vercel is billed to the team that owns it.

The repository itself stays where you created it. To hand over the code too, see GitHub access for client projects.

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Handing over at the end

When the work ends, Dana removes you:

1. Select Harbor Fitness from the team switcher, open Settings, then Members.
2. Next to your name, select the menu (...) and choose Remove from Team.

You can also remove yourself from the same page.

If you set the team up for Dana, hand over ownership before you go: invite her as an Owner, or switch her role with Manage Role, then demote or remove yourself. Vercel won't let a team lose its last Owner (Vercel). Invoices go to the team's first Owner by default, so if that was you, have Dana update Invoice Email Recipient and the payment method under Settings > Billing. The end-of-project handover checklist covers the other platforms.

Doing this for every client?

Get Set Keys gives each client one link that walks them through the Vercel invite and their other platforms, with your email and the right role already filled in, and checks that each step is done. Porter, the setup helper on every link, answers their questions straight away and passes anything it can't answer to you. You can reserve a founding place before Get Set Keys launches in November 2026.