How to hand off a Sanity blog template to clients?

Congratulations on completing your blog! 🎉 Great question about client handoff - this is a common workflow for agencies and freelancers using Sanity.

You have a few options for handing off a blog template to clients, depending on how you want to structure the relationship:

Option 1: Invite Client as Admin to Your Project (Simplest)

The quickest approach is to invite your client as an administrator to the Sanity project you've already created. They'll need to:

1. Sign up for a free Sanity account at manage.sanity.io
2. You invite them to your project with admin privileges
3. They can then manage content through the Studio

Pros: Quick setup, you maintain some oversight
Cons: The project stays under your account/billing, which isn't ideal long-term

Option 2: Transfer Project to Client's Organization (Recommended)

For a proper handoff, you'll want to transfer ownership to the client. Here's how:

1. Client creates a Sanity account and organization: Have them sign up at manage.sanity.io and create their own organization (which handles billing)

2. Transfer the Sanity project: As the current admin, you can move the project to their organization:

   • Go to manage.sanity.io and select your project
   • Navigate to Settings → scroll to the "Danger zone" section
   • Click "Transfer ownership"
   • Select their organization from the dropdown
   • Confirm the transfer

3. Transfer the Vercel project: Similarly, in Vercel's dashboard, you can transfer the project to their Vercel account/team so they control the frontend deployment

Pros: Clean separation, client owns everything, proper billing setup
Cons: Requires a bit more coordination

Option 3: Create Separate Organizations Per Client (Best for Agencies)

If you're planning to do this for multiple clients, consider creating a separate Sanity organization for each client from the start. This gives you:

• Clear billing separation
• Individual Media Libraries per client
• Easier handoff when projects complete
• Better tracking of resources per client

What the Client Gets

Once transferred, your client will have:

• Sanity Studio: The content management interface (the /studio route in your Next.js app)
• Content Lake: Their content stored in Sanity's database
• Free tier: Sanity's free plan is quite generous for blogs (includes 3 users, 10k documents, 500k API requests/month)
• Vercel hosting: The frontend on Vercel's free tier (or whatever plan they choose)

Pro Tips

• Document the handoff process with credentials, deployment steps, and how to make content changes
• Show them how to access the Studio and make basic edits
• Let them know about Sanity's pricing so they understand when they might need to upgrade
• Consider keeping yourself as a project member with appropriate permissions if you'll provide ongoing support

The cleanest path is Option 2 - have them create their own Sanity organization, then transfer both the Sanity project and Vercel project to their accounts. This gives them full ownership while keeping everything professional and properly billed.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask if you need clarification on any of these steps. 🚀