Mission Briefing
Managing creative projects often means keeping track of the same work in several places. The deadline is on a task board, the feedback is in an email, and the hours are in a separate time tracker. Multiply that by a few clients, and keeping everything up to date becomes a project of its own.
We designed and built Cinch to bring those pieces together. It gives freelancers, studios, and their clients a shared place to organize projects, review work, and track time, with room for the different ways each team works.
Deliverables
- Project Management Web Application
- Design Review and Annotation Tools
- Time Tracking and Scheduling
- AI Assistant Integrations and REST API
- Marketing Website
Audience Profile
Cinch was built around the people involved in getting client work out the door:
- Freelancers and small studios managing several clients, deadlines, and deliverables at once
- Agencies and consultants working across organizations, often with a different role on each team
- Clients and collaborators reviewing designs and copy, sharing feedback, and keeping up with project progress
Orbital Analysis
One of the first considerations was how people work across clients. A designer might manage one project and contribute to another, while needing to see both in the same daily schedule. We built Cinch to support multiple organizations within one account, with separate projects and permissions for each. The dashboard brings that person's work together, and filters let them focus on a particular client or project.
From there, we gave people several ways to organize the same work. Tasks can be viewed in a list, board, table, timeline, or calendar, depending on what someone needs to see. A board helps track work through review, while a timeline makes it easier to plan around dependencies. Nested subtasks let teams break a larger deliverable into manageable pieces without losing its place in the project.
Creative review was a major part of the build. We wanted feedback to stay connected to the deliverable, including the specific detail someone was commenting on. Clients and teammates can mark up images and multipage PDFs directly on a task, or select a passage of copy and leave a comment beside it. As revisions are made, comments can be resolved while keeping the discussion available for reference. Comment emails include the full feedback and, for copy reviews, the selected text, so recipients have the context they need before opening the app.
We also built time tracking into the task workflow. People can run a timer while they work or add hours afterward, with rounding settings for projects that bill in set increments. Scheduling supports both ordinary due dates and events with an exact time and timezone, such as a client call or launch. Together, these features keep the time spent on a deliverable close to its schedule and review history.
For people who already use AI assistants, we added a way to connect those tools to Cinch. Through MCP integrations, assistants such as Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT can work with the projects and tasks a user gives them access to. The connection is optional, permissions are controlled by the user, and access can be revoked in settings. A REST API also supports custom dashboards, exports, and other integrations.
Built with Next.js, tRPC, Prisma, and PostgreSQL, Cinch is available in 25 languages, with right-to-left layouts where needed. We also designed and built a separate marketing website to introduce the app and explain how its features fit into everyday project work.
Future Trajectories
Cinch is in beta at cinch.work, where it is free to use — the goal is to keep it that way. The work now is in refining the details that matter in daily use: reviewing copy, keeping track of time, and making it easier to move between projects.
Teams can bring existing work over from Asana and Notion exports, including nested tasks, dates, assignees, and tags. As Cinch gains traction, we are always looking for ways to make the work between the initial brief and final delivery easier to manage. If you have ideas for how Cinch could help your team, you can use the feedback widget in the bottom right of the app to share your thoughts.
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