New Project Controls: Better Visibility, Faster Builds

You have three active projects, two in revisions, and a pitch due Friday. One build went live last week and the client has since asked for a password-protected version instead. Your billing meeting is Wednesday and you’re guessing at what each client actually used last month.

That’s a week in a small agency. A lot of the work lives in the gaps between projects: the handoffs, the repeats, the billing, the cleanup. More happens there than inside any single build.

This week we shipped five features built around those gaps. Sticklight is an AI app builder for professionals, so every new feature starts from the same question: what’s getting in the way of delivering real client work? These five give you more control over your projects, from the first prompt to the final invoice.

Here’s what’s new, in the order you’ll meet them.

Brief it once with Project Instructions

Open a project. Click the settings gear at the top. The first thing you’ll see is Project Instructions.

This is the brief that sits behind every new conversation in your project. Up to 3,000 characters of context: project purpose, design preferences, brand colors, writing style, structure rules. Anything you’d otherwise repeat at the start of every chat.

Think of it as a brief for your AI collaborator. The same kind of brief you’d give a junior designer onboarding to a new client account. If you’re not sure where to start, our Help Center guide covers the setup process and includes tips on exactly what to write to get the best results.

Project Instructions live at the project level, so every prompt and every iteration after that inherits them. You stop retyping the brand primer at the start of each session. You stop reminding Sticklight that buttons should use your client’s accent color, not the default.

This “set-and-forget” configuration is a significant force multiplier for agencies managing multiple client personas simultaneously. By encoding your specific methodology and technical constraints into the project’s DNA, you reduce the cognitive load of switching contexts, ensuring that every AI-generated output aligns with your agency’s high standards for quality and consistency from day one.

For agency work, this matters most when you’re switching between clients. A minimalist SaaS build in the morning and a bold e-commerce brand in the afternoon used to mean re-briefing from scratch. Now you set the context once per project, update it anytime as the work evolves, and Sticklight keeps up.

Know what each project costs with Credits per project

Scroll down in the same settings panel and you’ll see something new: the credit count for that specific project.

Most creators work on a monthly credit plan. That works fine if you’re building one thing. It’s less useful when you’re running four clients in parallel and trying to figure out which one ate half your allowance.

Credits per project fixes the visibility problem. You get a clear number for how many credits each project has used, so you can bill accurately instead of estimating from memory.

A few ways agencies are already using it:

• Billing clients at cost. If a client agrees to AI-build time as a pass-through line item, you can pull exact numbers from Sticklight rather than reconstructing them after the fact.
• Quoting new work with real data. After a handful of projects in the same vertical, you start to know roughly how many credits a SaaS dashboard build takes compared to a marketing site. Quoting stops being guesswork and starts being pricing based on what you’ve actually spent.
• Catching scope creep before it hurts. When a project’s credits are climbing faster than expected, it usually means the brief has quietly expanded. Now you see it in the number before you see it in the timeline.

Skip the blank canvas with Project Duplication

Some new builds aren’t really new. Sometimes you’re shipping a variant of a site you already built. Sometimes the next client in the same vertical needs 80% of what the last one got. Sometimes you want to try a risky experiment without touching the original.

To duplicate, go to your Sticklight homepage. Find the project, click the three dots on the project card, and select Duplicate. The clone lands in your project list as “Clone of [Original Name]” and is fully independent from the source.

What duplicates: your full codebase: pages, components, layouts, styles, and assets. If you’re using Cloud Backend, your database structure comes along too: tables, columns, indexes, Row-Level Security policies, triggers, functions, extensions, auth configuration, and your Edge Functions code. For a full technical breakdown of how we handle the cloning process, comprehensive guide to duplicating websites.

What doesn’t duplicate, on purpose: your database content (tables come over empty so no user data leaks into the clone), your Edge Function secrets (API keys need to be re-added), your custom domain (the clone gets a new temporary subdomain), and your analytics history (the clone starts fresh).

It takes 1–3 minutes with Cloud Backend, nearly instant without. And it’s free. Duplication doesn’t use any credits, no matter how complex the project.

This architecture is designed for professional scalability, allowing you to create standardized “base templates” that serve as a launchpad for recurring project types. Whether you are building a series of micro-SaaS tools or managing a fleet of similar client portfolios, the duplication engine handles the heavy lifting of environment replication, so you can focus on the unique 20% of the build that actually requires custom creative input.

For agencies, this turns past work into starter material. Build one great SaaS dashboard, then duplicate it as the foundation for the next client in the same space. Or duplicate before any risky change, so the original is always safe.

Unpublish a project

Back to the settings panel. Below Credits, you’ll find Unpublish.

Sometimes a project went live before it should have. Sometimes a client decided the public version should be private. Sometimes a demo URL or that slide deck you built with Sticklight is making the rounds when it really shouldn’t be.

Unpublish handles all of those. One click takes the project’s published URL offline, instantly. The build stays in your workspace, intact and editable. When you’re ready to put it back up, you republish.

It’s a small thing that closes a real gap. Until now, taking a project offline meant deleting it or scrambling to fix the live version. Now you have a third option, and it’s the right one.

Get a clean slate with Delete Project

Same settings panel. Last item. Delete removes a project permanently. The codebase, the database, the build history, all gone, with no recovery. That’s the point. Old pitches that didn’t land, dead experiments, sunsetted client work. It all sits in your workspace until you clear them out.

When a project is genuinely done, Delete gives you back the clean slate.

The thread that ties it all together

Each of these five features comes from the same place: respect for how creators and agencies actually work. Your week isn’t one project. It’s many, at different stages, for different clients, with different rules. Sticklight should keep up with that, not the other way around. Brief once. Track what you spend. Reuse what works. Take down what shouldn’t be live, and clear out what’s done. The next big project on your list deserves a foundation built for the way you really run things.

We build Sticklight to be the tool that stays out of your way. Our goal is to remove the tedious stuff—like re-explaining a brand for the tenth time or guessing how much a project cost you—so you can actually focus on building. We’re here to give you the control you need to grow your agency, without the extra headache.

Start your next project on Sticklight.

FAQs

1. Where do I find these new features? Most of the new controls live right inside your project settings. Just open any project and click the settings gear icon at the top of the screen. In that single panel, you can set your Project Instructions, view Credits used on this project, Unpublish a live site, or Delete the project entirely. To duplicate a project, head to your studio homepage. Find the project card you want to clone, click the three dots (…), and select Duplicate. For step-by-step help, check out our walkthroughs on setting up Project Instructions and our guide to duplicating websites.
2. Does Project Duplication copy my backend too? Yes. With Cloud Backend, your tables, columns, RLS policies, triggers, functions, extensions, and auth config all duplicate alongside the front end. Two things don’t transfer for privacy reasons: your database content (tables come over empty) and your Edge Function secrets (API keys need to be re-added in the clone).
3. What’s the difference between Unpublish and Delete? Unpublish takes your project’s URL offline but keeps the project in your workspace, so you can republish later. Delete removes the project permanently with no way to recover it.
4. Can I edit Project Instructions after I’ve started a project? Yes. You can update them anytime, up to 3,000 characters. Sticklight uses the latest version on every new prompt, so your instructions can evolve with the project.
5. Are credits per project separate from my monthly credit balance? No. The credits shown per project are pulled from your usage on that specific build. Your monthly balance is the total across every project you’ve worked on.