Client and stakeholder approvals
Get client sign-off by a deadline, not fifteen messages
Four people need to pick between three options. Two reply, one replies in the wrong thread, one is on email only. A week later there is still no decision. Settle gives all four a private link each, one deadline and one result — and none of them create an account.
$199/month · no per-seat fees · Up to 30 stakeholders per decision
What is a stakeholder approval?
A stakeholder approval is a decision that needs a yes from several named people before work can continue — creative sign-off, a scope change, a vendor choice, a launch date. It fails in the same way every time: the people you need are the hardest to reach, and the approval you get back is a sentence in a thread rather than something you can point at three months later.
Why approvals stall
It isn't that people disagree. It's that nobody is answering the same question at the same time. The request arrives as prose, the options drift as the thread grows, and there is no moment at which the decision is definitively made — so everyone waits for someone else to declare it.
A decision needs four things to close on its own: a fixed question, a fixed set of options, a deadline, and a rule for what counts as agreement. Settle supplies all four and then enforces them.
How it works
- Create the decision in your dashboard, or start it from Slack with
/settleand finish it there. Add 2–6 options and a deadline. - Invite the stakeholders — up to 30, inside or outside your company. Each one gets their own link.
- They respond in the browser. Yes, no or maybe on each option, so you learn what someone could live with, not just their first pick.
- Settle chases the quiet ones and closes at your deadline under the rule you set.
- You get the record — Settled or Escalated, timestamped, with the full response breakdown. Share the link, print it, or export it.
Who you can ask
Clients
The people paying for the work, who have no reason to learn your project tooling.
Board members and investors
Senior people who answer email on a phone and will not create an account.
External partners
Another agency, a supplier, a channel partner — outside your workspace entirely.
Freelancers and contractors
On the project for six weeks. Onboarding them to a tool costs more than the decision.
Legal and finance contacts
Involved once, at the point of sign-off, and never again.
What the approver sees
This is the part that decides whether you get an answer.
- The question, as one sentence.
- The options, as a list.
- A control to mark each one yes, no or maybe.
- A deadline, so they know the request expires.
No account. No app. No workspace invite. No “enter your email to continue”. A stakeholder can go from opening the link to being done in under a minute on a phone, which is the only condition under which busy external people actually respond.
What you are probably doing instead
A Slack message with emoji
Fine inside your team. External stakeholders aren't in the channel, reactions aren't a record, and nothing closes on a deadline.
A shared document
Comments scatter, the last edit wins, and you still have to work out who actually agreed and when.
An email thread
No structure, no tally, and replies fork into private sub-threads you never see. The outcome lives in one person's inbox.
Each of these works right up until you need to prove what was agreed. See the full comparison with Google Forms for the case where you've already tried making a form do this job.
Common questions
What does the person approving actually see?
A page with the question, the options, and a control to mark each option yes, no or maybe. Nothing else. No sign-up form, no app store redirect, no request for their email to see the results.
Can people outside my company vote?
Yes — that is the primary case. Anyone you invite gets a link that works in any browser on any device. They never join your workspace, never create an account, and are never charged or counted as a seat.
How do I know the approval is real?
Each stakeholder is invited individually and their response is recorded against that invitation, with a timestamp. The closed record shows who responded, what they chose, who didn't respond, and the decision rule that was applied.
What decision rules can I set?
Majority, unanimity, or creator decides. Majority settles if more than half of the invited stakeholders have approved an option when the decision closes — at the deadline, or earlier if you press Settle now. Unanimity requires every invited stakeholder to approve the same one. Creator decides collects everyone's input and hands the call back to you.
What happens at the deadline?
Settle closes the decision automatically. If your rule was met it is marked Settled with the winning option. If it wasn't — no majority, a tie, two options both clearing a majority, or unanimity not reached — it is marked Escalated and returned to you with the reason. Either way you get the record.
How long can a deadline be?
Anything from one hour to 30 days. Most client approvals sit between 24 and 72 hours — long enough for someone in another timezone, short enough that it doesn't drift.
What does it cost the people I'm asking?
Nothing, ever. Settle for Teams is a flat workspace price with no per-seat fees, and voters are outside the billing model entirely.
Your first client decision, in under a minute
Add Settle to Slack, or start the trial from the dashboard. 7-day free trial, then $199/month flat — no per-seat fees, and the people you're asking never pay anything.
25 managed decisions a month · Unlimited team members · Cancel anytime