iThemes Sync has a decent amount of competition between ManageWP, Jetpack Manage, and others that offer site management services that allow you to manage and update themes, plugins, and WordPress core.
But they’ve recently come out with a feature that is new and intriguing to me — a report generator to send to your clients you manage via Sync. I think this is a very clever feature that would be compelling to the thousands of agencies and freelancers that keep monthly maintenance contracts with their clients.
You can make the reports be HTML or plain text email, PDFs, or other formats; and you can set custom date ranges to send the reports once per month, week, etc.
Keeping clients on residual income for maintenance can be a very good business model. Say you charge $150 per month for hosting, maintenance, and support; if you do that 200 times you’re making $30,000 per month. And a report like this gives the customer peace of mind.
I’m impressed to see a feature like this from Sync, and I think it’s a great way for iThemes to set the product apart from an option like Jetpack that will inevitably be much more end-user centric.