Quiet — MSP operator guide

Overview

Quiet is a self-service IT storefront that you sell to your own business end-customers. You brand the site, choose what it sells and invite customers; they sign themselves up, and from then on they work from a portal of their own.

Quiet is part of the Hub portal — there is no separate Quiet application to install or deploy. It has three surfaces, and they are not interchangeable:

• The public site — your own branded marketing page with self-serve signup, served at the marketing subdomain you publish on the Branding tab.

• The Quiet console — the MSP-side surface, at /admin/quiet in the Hub portal, where you enable Quiet and configure the branding, the catalog, the bundles, the store switches and the customer list. Its tabs are Overview, Branding, Catalog, Bundles, Store & fulfillment and Customers.

• The customer portal — what your end-customer sees after signing up: a posture Home, a Store, My Services, and Devices & Users.

A Quiet end-customer is a business organisation, and it is a distinct audience from your managed clients. A Quiet customer is an organisation that bought self-service IT from your storefront; it is not one of your managed clients with a portal login. Quiet organisations carry your MSP as their parent organisation, so one customer's data never bleeds into another's.

Where Quiet stands today

The MSP-side surfaces — the console and the public marketing and signup pages — are withheld from the launcher for the MSP-use-only launch. The console is not offered in the product switcher, and a deep link to /admin/quiet lands on Products. This is a launch decision with a written restore recipe rather than a fault: the pages are still built and still shipped behind the decision.

One thing is deliberately not behind that decision. An end-customer who already holds a Quiet session renders the client portal in Quiet mode regardless of the launcher, because a real Quiet customer must never land in the MSP administrative shell.

The rest of this guide describes the console as it is built.

How To: Enable Quiet

1. Open the Quiet console (/admin/quiet). Enabling requires an MSP owner or admin role.

2. Use the enable action on the Overview tab.

3. Enabling turns the Quiet entitlement on for your organisation, flips the console's own enabled flag so the Overview tab reflects reality, and provisions a working storefront — a default marketing subdomain derived from your organisation, a starter catalog and default bundles.

4. The Overview tab then shows the activation checklist and the URLs your site and signup form are live at.

Enabling is idempotent. Run it again on an organisation that is already enabled and it re-provisions whatever is still missing (a subdomain that was never stamped, an empty catalog, no bundles) instead of failing.

Disabling Quiet stops the storefront. It does not delete customer accounts, their data or their organisation records. Flipping a single organisation between Quiet and managed is a separate action, and moving an organisation onto Quiet additionally requires your MSP's Quiet to be enabled — role and ownership alone are not enough.

How To: Brand the storefront

The Branding tab holds everything the public site renders:

• Logo URL and primary colour — used by the public site.

• Marketing subdomain — the address your public site is served at. Enabling Quiet stamps a default; change it here.

• Custom domain — optional, and a separate address from the subdomain.

• Template — the site layout (clean minimal, card grid, comparison table or story driven).

• Copy overrides — per-string replacements over the template's own copy.

The subdomain is what makes the site live

The storefront's live URL is derived from the marketing subdomain. A configuration that carries only a custom domain does not count as live: the activation checklist marks the site live only when Quiet is enabled, a subdomain is set and at least one bundle exists — so set a subdomain even if you also use a custom domain.

How To: Choose what you resell

The Catalog tab lists the products Quiet may offer. It is an allow-list, not your whole product catalogue: only products that a Quiet end-customer can actually open are offered. The catalog decides what you may put in a bundle — what your customer is actually sold and priced is the bundle, not an individual catalog entry.

Turn on the products you want in your storefront and save. The public site renders only what you enabled, and a product you leave off cannot be placed in a bundle. If a stored selection ever contains a product that is no longer offerable, it is dropped when the configuration is read, so the console cannot keep selling something a customer could not open.

How To: Build a bundle

A bundle is what your customer actually buys. The Bundles tab creates, edits and deletes them:

• Name — what the customer sees on the site.

• Products — one or more products from your enabled catalog. A bundle needs at least one.

• Minimum seats — the smallest quantity the bundle is sold in.

• Promoted — marks the bundle the site leads with, and the one the invite email and the signup link default to.

Your storefront is not sellable until it has a subdomain and at least one bundle carrying at least one product. The activation checklist says so, and the invite action refuses rather than sending a customer to a storefront that is not ready.

How To: Turn the Store and shipping on or off

The Store & fulfillment tab is two switches:

• Hardware Store — whether customers can order recommended hardware from their portal's Store.

• Shipping & fulfillment — whether the platform will quote a shipment, buy the label for it, and accept the customer's hardware delivery order.

With the Hardware Store switch off, the Store row disappears from the customer's navigation and their Store page says the Store is not switched on — there is no read-only catalogue to browse. The Store's own endpoints refuse as well, so a customer cannot reach it through a saved link either. The switch is read from the same session the server publishes it on, so a Store you turn off is never advertised to a customer the server would refuse.

The Shipping & fulfillment switch is read by the server — it is not saved and ignored. It is applied, in this order, to the three routes a shipment can pass through:

1. The shipping quote (POST /api/portal/quiet/shipping/quote) — refused before a rate is shopped, so a customer is never quoted a price for a shipment the purchase would refuse.

2. The label purchase (POST /api/portal/quiet/shipping/labels) — the route that buys the label and charges your MSP's stored payment instrument off-session. This one is owner/admin only, and that check runs before the switch in the same handler, so a caller who is not the organisation's owner or admin is refused on the role ground alone (403 FORBIDDEN) and the switch is never read for them. An owner or admin on an MSP whose switch is off meets the switch's own refusal instead.

3. The hardware delivery order (POST /api/portal/quiet/store/orders) — refused before the order is recorded. Every order this route accepts is a delivery, so a delivery you have switched off is never accepted and no order is placed for one.

The shipping quote and the hardware delivery order answer 403 SHIPPING_DISABLED. The label purchase answers 403 FORBIDDEN to a caller who is not the organisation's owner or admin, and 403 SHIPPING_DISABLED only to an owner or admin whose MSP has the switch off. Reads are deliberately not gated: order history, the Store catalogue and a shipment's existing labels stay readable with the switch off.

How To: Invite a customer

1. Open the Customers tab.

2. Use the invite action, enter the customer's email address and an optional note, and send.

3. The customer receives an email from your own sending domain with a link to your signup form. The link carries the address you invited and the promoted bundle, so they retype neither.

The invite does not create the account. The customer completes the signup form on your public site themselves, and becomes a Quiet organisation when they do. If your sending domain is not verified, the invite is refused rather than sent from the platform's own domain — and the console still shows you the signup link so you can pass it on by hand.

The Customers tab also lists your Quiet customers. It distinguishes "this MSP has no Quiet customers yet" from "the customer list could not be read", and does not collapse the two.

How To: Check your site is live

The Overview tab's activation checklist tracks: enabled, branded, catalog picked, bundle created, storefront live, and first customer. The same data is read from the site status endpoint, which reports your marketing URL and signup URL alongside the checklist.

Who pays for what

• The customer's subscription is bought through the public signup form.

• Hardware orders placed in the customer's Store take no payment step. The order is recorded, and the portal tells the customer that the order and its shipping are arranged and paid for by the provider that runs the store — that is you.

• Shipping labels are bought on the platform's Shippo account and charged off-session to your MSP's stored payment instrument, never to the customer. The outbound label and the return label are generated together as one combined price, so a customer can send hardware back without a second charge. A currency and payment preflight runs before any label is bought, so a label is never purchased against an instrument that cannot pay for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Quiet the same thing as my managed clients? No. Quiet's end-customers are a distinct audience: organisations that buy self-service IT from your storefront. Your managed clients are a different population with a different relationship to you, and the two are not interchangeable.

Do I need to deploy anything for Quiet? No. Quiet is part of the Hub portal. There is no separate Quiet service, no separate address to configure, and no separate login.

Can a customer sign up without an invite? Yes. The public signup route is open, and an invitation is a convenience — it pre-fills the address and the bundle — not a gate.

What happens to my customers if I disable Quiet? The storefront stops. Nothing is deleted: the customer organisations, their accounts and their data stay where they are.

Why can I not see the Quiet tile in the launcher? Because the MSP-side surfaces are withheld for the MSP-use-only launch. See "Where Quiet stands today" above.

Why is my site not live even though I enabled Quiet? Check two things on the Overview checklist: that a marketing subdomain is set, and that at least one bundle holds at least one product. Either one missing leaves the storefront not-live.

A product I wanted is not in the Catalog tab. The tab offers only products a Quiet end-customer can actually open. A product outside that set cannot be packaged for Quiet.

Troubleshooting

The invite failed but the customer never received an email. The console tells you when the send was refused, and shows the signup link. Copy the link and send it yourself. The cause is a sending domain that is not verified for your MSP — the invite is deliberately refused rather than sent from the platform's own domain under your branding.

The Customers tab shows no customers and no error. That is a measured zero, not a failed read — the two states are reported separately. If the list could not be read, the tab says so instead.

A customer says the Store is missing from their portal. Check the Hardware Store switch on the Store & fulfillment tab. With it off, the Store row is hidden from the customer's navigation and the Store's own endpoints refuse.

A customer ordered hardware and wants to know what it cost them. Nothing. The order carries no payment step, and the portal says who arranges and pays for it. Shipping is charged to your MSP's payment instrument, not to the customer.