A few months ago, we shared our vision for Zendo 3.0 as a significant step-change for the platform: a unified service system, smarter order flows, modular storefronts, and a much more flexible way to work with clients.
Zendo 3.0 is going live this weekend.
But it’s not the complete “everything at once” release we originally outlined.
Instead, it’s something slightly different — and, we believe, ultimately stronger: a foundational release that untangles some of the most complex architectural problems first, even if that means fewer shiny features on day one.
This article explains:
- What’s actually shipping in 3.0,
- Why we deliberately cut scope,
- and How this sets Zendo up for the next wave of client-portal features.
What We Wanted to Change
Over the past few years, Zendo has grown from a “chat + payments” tool into a complete client portal with productized services, subscriptions, quotes, invoicing, and more.
That growth came with a tradeoff: requests and services became tightly coupled. Everything in Zendo assumed that a request was born from a service, and many workflows had to be modeled as “fake” services just to make sense.
We wanted to fix that by:
➡️ making requests fully independent from services,
➡️ redefining how services, orders, and checkout work on top of that,
➡️ and simplifying the way you sell and deliver work.
Once we started, it became clear: to truly decouple requests, we had to rewrite a large part of the app.
That’s precisely what we did for this 3.0 release.
What’s Actually Shipping in Zendo 3.0
1. A new, more powerful Request form
Requests now come with a completely new form experience.
This gives you:
🔹 more flexibility in how you collect information from clients,
🔹 better support for non-standard workflows (e.g., inquiries, onboarding, custom briefs),
🔹 and a cleaner base for future improvements, such as conditional logic and reusable templates.
In practice, this means requests are no longer “just” simple threads attached to a service. They become a more capable building block for your client operations.
2. Request Types instead of “Free Services”
We’ve removed the old “free service type” workaround.
In its place, we’re introducing Request Types — configurable types of requests you define yourself.
This lets you:
🔹 model different flows: inquiries, support tickets, onboarding questionnaires, change requests, etc.,
🔹 stop pretending every interaction needs to be a “service” just to exist in the system,
🔹 keep your catalog of services focused on what you actually sell, not everything you need to talk about.
Request Types are one of the key steps in treating Zendo first and foremost as a client portal, not just a services storefront.
3. A deep refactor of how requests work under the hood
This is the part that’s harder to screenshot, but more important long-term.
To separate requests from services, we had to:
🔹 touch and refactor most of the application,
🔹 adjust how different modules talk to each other,
🔹 remove many historical assumptions baked into the code.
As a result, 3.0:
✅ is better prepared for advanced automations,
✅ can support more use cases around communication and request handling,
✅ and will let us evolve services, orders, and storefronts with less friction going forward.
4. What’s not changing yet
Just as important: some things are intentionally unchanged in this release.
🟣 Services still work the way you know them today.
We haven’t moved them to the new unified model yet – doing that on top of a significant architectural change would have increased risk and migration complexity.
🟣 Orders, checkout, and storefronts stay in their current form for now.
Their redesign will come later, built on top of the new foundations, not in parallel.
Why We Cut Scope (On Purpose)
From the outside, it’s easy to ask:
“If you promised more, why not just ship all of it now?”
There are three reasons.
1. Stability comes first.
Rebuilding a core part of the system while changing sales flows simultaneously is a recipe for hard-to-debug issues in production. We chose to keep the commercial side familiar while we reworked the fundamentals.
2. Migrations are real work.
Many teams rely on Zendo for daily operations. Any change to services, pricing, or billing structures must be carefully introduced with clear migration paths. Rushing this would create more pain than value.
3. We want the correct sequence, not just more features.
Decoupling requests opens up many possibilities. Doing that well first gives us more room to design simpler, more powerful services and orders next – instead of patching over old constraints.
In short, Zendo 3.0 ships less than initially promised, but it ships the part that matters most for everything that comes after.
What This Means for Your Day-to-Day
From a user’s perspective, you get a more capable Request form, making it easier to:
✅ collect structured information from clients,
✅ run non-sales workflows (like onboarding, feedback, or internal approvals),
✅ keep everything in the client portal rather than using external tools.
The “Free Services” will be automatically migrated to Request Types. We will also add them as “tiles” to your Storefront, but in 3.0, you can choose whether to keep them as tiles or add them to a storefront header. Both (the tile and the header button) will open a pop-up that allows submitting requests.
The Order Forms stay as is and are tied to a service. Request types have their own form. To avoid having double forms, you can disable the Order Form in services or the Request Form for a specific Request Type.
You can define your own Request Types, giving structure to:
🔹 general questions,
🔹 support issues,
🔹 project change requests,
🔹 or any other client interaction that doesn’t fit into “buy service X”.
You’re using a system that’s technically ready for:
✅ better automations around requests,
✅ more intelligent routing and permissions,
✅ and a more modular future for services and orders.
On the surface, Zendo will still feel familiar.
Underneath, it’s a very different platform than it was a few months ago.
What We’re Focusing on Next
For the next few months, our focus shifts from “rebuild everything at once” to doubling down on what makes Zendo a strong client portal.
On the near-term roadmap:
🎯 Custom fields for client profiles.
🎯 A more granular permissions system.
🎯 Folders for file exchange.
🎯 Document signing inside Zendo.
🎯 Automations.
🎯 Many more minor Client Portal improvements.
Once these pillars are in place, we’ll move back to:
🎯 the new unified service model,
🎯 improved orders and checkout,
🎯 and more flexible storefronts — now built on top of a cleaner, more robust foundation.
Fewer Promises, More Follow-Through
We’re not pretending Zendo 3.0 shipped exactly as initially envisioned.
It didn’t.
We are, however, confident in the trade we made: a minor visible release now, in exchange for a much more solid base for everything we want to build next.
If you’re already using Zendo, 3.0 gives you:
✅ a stronger way to handle client requests,
✅ cleaner workflows that don’t need “fake” services,
✅ and the assurance that future features are being built on solid ground.
If you’re just discovering Zendo, this is the start of a new phase:
One where the product evolves in smaller, safer steps — focused on real client work, not just big version numbers.
Zendo 3.0 is not the finish line.
It’s the foundation.
