Every freelancer has lived this moment. You quoted a five-page website — two revision rounds, four weeks. Six weeks in, you are on page nine, round five, and a Slack message lands: “quick one — could we also add a booking flow?” You say yes, because saying no feels like a fight over something small, and because you cannot immediately prove it is small.
That yes is where your margin goes. Not your rate.
Stria is a freelancer OS built around the one job most tools ignore: keeping the work you get paid for aligned with the work you agreed to do.
The short version
- Scope creep is a records problem, not a discipline problem — you cannot refuse what you cannot prove was out of scope.
- Stria turns your agreement into a locked, versioned record, then watches the client mail you forward and flags requests that fall outside it.
- Detection is on the free plan. You pay only when you want the one-click change order and unlimited volume.
- Start free at getstria.com — free plan, no card, no waitlist.
The real cost of scope creep is not your rate
Ask a freelancer what they charge and you get a number to the dollar. Ask what they actually earned per hour on their last project and you get a pause.
The gap between those two numbers is the entire problem, and it has one cause: the work changes after the price is fixed, and nothing in the usual toolchain notices. The contract is a PDF in a folder. The scope is a bulleted list buried in an email thread. The revisions are “a couple more tweaks” spread across four conversations. By the time you suspect you are underwater, the evidence is scattered across three tools and you are too far in to reopen it.
So the request that should have been a $900 change order becomes a free afternoon, then a free week. Nobody behaves badly. The information simply is not there when the decision gets made.
What Stria does differently: scope becomes a locked record
Stria is a full workspace for independent freelancers — clients, proposals, contracts, deliverables, review links, invoices, deposits, retainers, time tracking, scheduling, expenses. That part is table stakes, and we will come back to it.
The part that matters: what you agreed is a locked, versioned record — not a document anyone can quietly edit.
When you start a project, you write down what is included: the line items, your assumptions, what is explicitly out, the acceptance criteria, and how many revision rounds the fee covers. Then you lock it. Locking is the step that turns prose into a reference point.
From that moment:
- Every new request can be judged. Paste or forward the email; Stria compares it against the locked record and proposes a call — in scope, partly in scope, likely out of scope, or needs clarification. It proposes; you decide, and your override is recorded as yours.
- Revision rounds count against a number you agreed, so the meter can say “round 2 of 3 included” — and tell you the moment the next change stops being free.
- A change order supersedes with a new version instead of editing the old one. The agreement and the record never diverge, and you can always show what was true in week three.
- Approvals are evidence. A client signs off through a review link — no login, no seat — with an emailed code confirming their identity. What they approved, and which version, is on the record. (More on what makes a client approval defensible.)
An unlocked draft does none of this. We say so plainly inside the product, because the worst failure mode of a scope feature is a freelancer who believes they are protected and is not.
Meet the Scope Sentinel: detection that does not wait for you
Everything above still has one flaw, and it is the one that matters: it assumes you notice.
Scope creep does not announce itself. It arrives as a favour, late on a Friday, phrased so that refusing feels petty — exactly when you are least likely to check it against the agreement. A feature that only works when you remember to use it is a feature that works on your best days.
So Stria watches for you. Forward the message — or put the client’s Stria address in CC and forget about it. Every client record has its own address. From there:
- Within a few minutes, the Sentinel checks the new message against the locked scope for that project.
- A real finding says the request contains something outside what was agreed — and, if you have built a rate card, what it is worth.
- It lands as a notification and sits in a queue on Scope & Changes, with the next move one click away: price a change order, or dismiss it with a recorded reason.
It never emails your client, never raises an invoice, and never creates a change order on its own. It brings you the decision, already researched. You make it.
Why forwarding, not a mailbox connection
Because you should not have to hand over your inbox to find out what you are owed.
Reading a Gmail mailbox requires a Google restricted scope — OAuth verification plus an annual third-party security assessment on Google’s schedule. Forwarding needs none of it, and the moment a message arrives, the judgment is identical. There is no mailbox to authorize and no standing permission over years of unrelated mail. The Sentinel only ever sees the messages you chose to send it, and it is off until an admin turns it on. (The full reasoning: why Stria will never connect to your inbox.)
The honest limits
A watcher you over-trust is worse than one you understand:
- It needs a locked scope to measure against. No baseline? It tells you one is missing rather than guessing — and that costs nothing.
- It will not guess the target. If the sender matches no client, or a client has two live projects and the message names neither, it asks.
- It will not price everything. No rate card means no figure. We would rather show a finding with no number than a confident wrong one.
- It does not read backwards. A first sweep reaches back seven days by default, thirty at most; nothing forwarded before you enabled it was stored.
- One message, one finding. It flags that a message contains out-of-scope work; it will not itemise four separate asks buried in one email.
Detection sits on the free plan on purpose — capped at 8 checks a day, 40 a month, rising to 40 and 400 on a paid plan. Nobody can evaluate “we watch your client mail for scope creep” from a pricing page. You evaluate it the first time it catches something real.
Know what your hours actually earned
Because Stria holds your hours and your invoices in the same place, it computes the number that started this post: what each logged hour actually earned — invoiced, minus absorbed expenses, divided by hours logged.
It stays blank until you log time. An unmeasured rate is not zero, and we would rather show a dash than a confident wrong number. That figure is how a fixed fee that felt generous in March turns out to have been $34 an hour by May — and it is the argument you take into your next quote.
The timer runs server-side with idle detection, and a session longer than eight hours is treated as a forgotten clock, not a marathon: the stop dialog leaves Billable unticked. That default is deliberately lopsided. Under-billing a long session is a conversation; over-billing seventeen hours nobody worked is an invoice that should not exist.
Payments run through your Stripe, not ours
Stria uses Stripe Connect on your own account. We take no platform fee, and no percentage of your work passes through us.
That is not the norm in this category. Suites that process payments in-house typically add a margin, and it hurts most on bank transfers — a percentage with no cap on a five-figure invoice is real money. On roughly $8,000 a month of bank-transfer volume, the difference runs about $100 a month against an in-house processor — around $1,200 a year for the same money moving. If you take cards only, the gap is close to nil, and we would rather say that than imply a saving that does not apply to you.
The rest of the workspace
Scope enforcement only works next to the invoice, the hours, and the approval it argues about. Here is what ships alongside it:
| Capability | What it does |
|---|---|
| Conversations | Every client email and portal thread in one list, with per-person unread tracking, labels, search, and an “awaiting reply” filter. |
| Xero reconciliation | Two-way. A payment reconciled in Xero but missing in Stria is surfaced for one-click confirmation. |
| Business health | Every figure scoped to a month, quarter, year, or custom range, with expense-category and client-concentration breakdowns. |
| Lead forms | Build an intake form question by question and publish it when it is ready. |
| Purchase orders | Add a PO number to an invoice, or require one for clients whose accounts payable will not pay without it. |
| Multi-currency | A workspace default, plus yearly totals converted at your own rates with the basis shown. |
| API & webhooks | A versioned v1 API with per-token scopes, inbound webhooks, and an event catalogue (paid plans). |
What Stria is not
A launch post that only lists strengths is not information:
- It is not your mail client. Conversations centralises client threads, but they get there because you forwarded them. The habit is yours to keep.
- It is not a dedicated time tracker. The timer is good and tied to the money; purpose-built trackers go deeper on reporting and desktop capture.
- It will not fix a bad quote. It will tell you sooner, with receipts, that the quote was bad. That is the useful version — but it is not the same thing.
Simple, transparent pricing
- Free — 3 clients, 6 deliverables a month, and real scope detection (not a preview).
- Freelancer Solo — $19/month — two seats, unlimited clients, unlimited deliverables.
- Studio — $39/month — five seats.
Flat pricing, never per client and never per reviewer. Payments run through your own Stripe account, so there is no platform fee on top of your processor.
Frequently asked questions
What problem does Stria solve? Work grows after the price is fixed, and most freelance tooling cannot tell you when. Stria keeps an itemised, versioned record of what was agreed, so a later request is judged against a specific version and priced instead of absorbed.
Does Stria need access to my email account? No. There is no mailbox connection and no OAuth grant. Each client record has its own Stria address, and you forward the messages you want on the record. Turning the feature off stops the examination without touching your mail.
Is Stria a project manager or an invoicing tool? Both — but that is not the point. Proposals, invoices, deposits, retainers, time tracking, and a client portal are table stakes here. What Stria adds is scope enforcement: a locked, versioned agreement that change orders supersede rather than overwrite.
How much does Stria cost? There is a free plan with 3 clients and 6 deliverables a month. Freelancer Solo is $19 a month with two seats and unlimited clients and deliverables. Payments run through your own Stripe account, and Stria takes no platform fee.
Try it against a real argument
The honest test of Stria is not a demo project. It is the next time a client asks for “one more small thing.” Write down what you agreed, lock it, switch the Sentinel on, and forward the request. Either you learn it was in scope and proceed with a clear head, or you learn it was not — and you have a priced change order and the version history to explain it.
That minute is the product. The point of the Sentinel is that you no longer have to remember to spend it.
Start free — one email, no card. Prefer to watch it work first? Open the live demo.
Competitor pricing and fee figures are drawn from third-party comparisons in our own competitive analysis (medium-high confidence). Vendors reprice — check current pricing before deciding. Content was rephrased for compliance with licensing restrictions.