Vendasta is a good platform. We don’t say that lightly — we wouldn’t be building a product on top of it if it weren’t. The Marketplace is broad, the white-label options are real, the API is decent, and the storefront layer means agencies can stand up a credible reseller business in days instead of months.
But running an agency on Vendasta long enough exposes a pattern: the platform is exceptionally good at the delivery side of the business, and surprisingly bare on the operating side.
If you’ve ever found yourself building a Google Sheet to reconcile what Vendasta charged you against what your client paid you, or running invoices out of a separate Stripe dashboard that has no idea Vendasta exists, you know the gap we’re talking about. Here’s what it actually is.
What Vendasta gives you
Let’s start with the things Vendasta does well, because the gap only matters once you understand the foundation.
You get a product catalog of marketing services — listings, reputation, social, ads, websites, SEO — that you can resell under your agency’s brand. You get a storefront where your clients (or your sales team, on their behalf) can browse and buy. You get a fulfillment layer that delivers most of those services through white-label vendors and Vendasta’s own teams. You get a business app store where you can include partner products. You get a CRM and snapshot report that helps your salespeople pitch.
That’s the platform. It’s a real platform, and it does real work. If you’re an agency owner who used to spend three Fridays a month managing fulfillment vendors directly, the relief of moving that to Vendasta is genuine.
What Vendasta doesn’t give you
Now the gap. The things you discover Vendasta doesn’t do once you’re a few months into running the business.
Real billing. Vendasta will track what was provisioned for which client, but it does not bill your clients on your behalf. You have to take that data and turn it into invoices in a different system — usually Stripe, sometimes QuickBooks. The mapping between “what Vendasta provisioned” and “what to invoice” is your problem to maintain, not Vendasta’s.
ACH and recurring auto-draft. Vendasta supports payment, but for Vendasta charging you. Your clients paying you is on you to figure out. ACH is a particular pain — most agencies want to move clients off cards onto bank-link to save on processing, but the workflow for that has to be built outside Vendasta entirely.
KPI dashboards at the agency level. Vendasta gives clients a snapshot. It does not give you a real-time dashboard of your agency’s ARR, MRR, churn, gross margin, or per-service profitability. If you want any of that, you’re exporting to a spreadsheet and rebuilding the math monthly.
Per-client margin tracking. This is the big one. Vendasta knows exactly what they charged your agency for each provisioned service. You know exactly what you charged your client. Nobody is automatically computing the difference. You learn that a client is barely-profitable or actually-underwater the same way agencies have always learned it: in a quarterly panic when someone runs a manual report.
Branded invoices and statements. Vendasta’s invoices to you are Vendasta-branded. Your invoices to your clients are whatever your billing system makes — typically default Stripe receipts that look nothing like your agency’s brand and contain none of the context the client actually wants (“what specifically did I pay for this month?”).
A proper white-label customer portal. Vendasta gives end clients a portal, but it’s branded as the white-label storefront. It doesn’t include billing, statements, or payment-method management as first-class features at the agency’s brand level. End clients end up having to go to two or three different places — your storefront, your separate billing system, sometimes your sales team’s email — to handle what should be one experience.
Multi-tenancy at the agency-of-agencies level. Some agencies operate multiple sub-brands, regional offices, or sister agencies that all use Vendasta. Each Vendasta partner account is a silo. Rolling up the financials across sub-brands is a manual exercise.
None of these are bugs. They’re scope decisions. Vendasta has chosen to be deep on delivery and storefront, and to leave the operating layer to the agencies. That’s a reasonable choice for them. It’s just not a complete agency stack.
The duct-tape stack agencies actually run
Walk into a room of Vendasta partner agencies and ask what runs their business. The honest answer, in our experience, is some combination of:
- A spreadsheet mapping Vendasta’s provisioned services to monthly invoice line items
- Stripe (or QuickBooks Online) issuing the invoices, with pricing that has to be kept manually in sync with the spreadsheet
- A separate cold-email system for collecting on overdue invoices
- A monthly manual process to compare Vendasta cost reports against billing exports to compute margin per client
- A pile of recurring calendar reminders to renew, upsell, or fire the clients whose margin has gone underwater
This works. It’s how the agency industry has run for years. But it has predictable failure modes: the spreadsheet drifts, a client gets billed for a canceled service, a new service doesn’t get added to the billing map for two months, margin per client only gets reviewed quarterly, and the customer portal experience is fragmented.
What HubWho is
HubWho is what we built to fill that gap. It’s not a replacement for Vendasta — it’s a layer on top. A Vendasta-native business operating system for agencies that resell Vendasta services. It connects to your Vendasta partner account via API and pulls down what was actually provisioned. It generates invoices from that data automatically, branded as your agency. It handles ACH, credit-card, and recurring auto-draft. It compares Vendasta’s cost to your client charge in real time and tells you per-client margin without any export. It gives you and your clients a real white-label portal — your colors, your domain, your brand — for billing, statements, and payment methods.
The thesis is simple: Vendasta does delivery exceptionally well, and we don’t want to compete with that. But the operating layer of an agency has been a duct-tape job for too long, and it’s a layer that wants to be a real product. If you run a Vendasta-reseller agency and any of the gaps above sound familiar, HubWho is what we’re building for you. Join the waitlist at roffik.com/contact.
