I’ve never done freelance work before, but I’ve agreed to build a small Meteor app for a friend’s fitness company, and I’m wondering how to handle account ownership for all the services needed for the app e.g. Meteor Galaxy, Mongo, S3, Imgix, etc. What’s the best practice for this? Should I use the client’s email to create new accounts at each service (but then how will I get necessary emails?), or should I use my own?
Some services already provide means to grant 3rd parties access to owners’ accounts, but with or without that, it would be more managable if you can get the client to register a specific email address for the management of such services and then you could simply have temporary access to that email or have it forwarded to you over the course of your work arrangement.
This is of course most viable for clients who are individuals and small companies. For larger and/or more organized clients you would have them designate a key/technical contact person to you who would arrange all these.
For development in general, it’s best if you used your personal accounts (for most common services at least) so that you always have access to the overall environment and get better acquainted with them. You can then set up your deployment process to switch over to the client’s credentials.
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I’ve been thinking lately it’d be nice to have a service that improves this… you send an invite to the client then you can both manage the 5-10 services from there (mailgun, mixpanel, hosting, DB, etc. etc.). Like a dashboard with a zapier/mashpee twist.
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I’ve tried doing this a few different ways over the years, and the solution that I’ve settled on is to start with a Mailgun account. Then I create an internal mailing list (something like engineering@mg.clientdomain.example), which forwards email to both myself and my primary contact at the client.
Then I create all other service accounts for the client using that. I keep all the credentials I create in a password manager, and either sync it to their Github or hand it over at the end of the job, whatever makes the most sense for the contract.
I like to use a new Mailgun account for each client, so that they end up with full control, but you could also just use one Mailgun account for yourself or your agency, personal preference really.
I find this works pretty well.
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