If We Started Over Today: Why We Built Frankly

Every software company with a long history eventually faces the same question: keep building on what you have, or start over? At Function Software, our answer was both. We kept supporting the products our customers rely on, and we asked our team what they would build from scratch. That became Frankly: an agency platform built on everything we learned from more than fifty years alongside agencies.

I joined Function Software at the start of this year, after years in the startup world, most recently running a fintech SaaS business. I’d also spent a long time working alongside creative and in-house marketing teams, so I came in with fresh eyes on a world I already knew. I’ve always thought creatives are their own kind of brilliant. They’re unique, they take risks, and they actually make art. Now I’m part of the team that builds for them every day.

Get close enough tofeel it

The first thing I wanted to do was get to know the people, then dive into the products.

What became obvious right away was how passionate this team is. They don’t just build software for the creative industry. They’re in the trenches with the agencies that use it. Several people on our CX team were practically embedded with their customers. They felt those customers’ challenges as their own and helped solve them day to day.

If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that you can’t replace being close to your customers and your industry. You also can’t manufacture passion. Finding a team that checked both boxes was really motivating.

I had several calls with customers where they raved about the people they work with here. Most of those conversations weren’t about the product at all. They were about the people, and you could see the trust. I heard something else too, sometimes in the same conversation: they wished new things came faster. Both were fair, and both shaped what came next.

Then there were the products: two of them, each with more than twenty-five years of pedigree, over fifty years combined alongside agencies.

FunctionFox surprised me most: how much value a small agency gets out of it. It’s affordable, it’s simple, and it grows with you. Frankly isn’t about replacing it. FunctionFox has its own road ahead, and there’s a big next step coming for it that I’m looking forward to sharing.

Function Point deserves a candid word. Its limits are technical, and only technical. It’s built on architecture decisions made more than twenty years ago, and those decisions make it hard to build on top of. New things take longer to land than our customers or our team would like. Those same decisions are also why it’s so stable and reliable. For a lot of agencies, that stability is exactly the point, and those customers will keep getting our full support from the same people they already trust.

Meanwhile, the ideas kept piling up. Our team, and our customers, had years of thinking about how agency software could work differently. Some of those ideas had been on whiteboards for a very long time.

Give your team roomto build

So we asked the team a simple question: if we started over, today, what would you build?

It was amazing to watch them work. It was like the chains had come off. Years of ideas came together around one goal: making our customers’ lives easier. The vision had been there the whole time, in the heads of people who had spent years listening to agencies. So we committed to building it.

My job wasn’t to supply the answer. It was to ask the question, clear the way, and back the team. That meant making sure they had the time and space to work and be creative. It meant bringing in a great technology leader so the technology could match the ambition, and strengthening the product team. And it meant encouraging even more of what they were already doing: talking to customers and getting out to events, so we knew not just where agencies are today, but where they’re going.

Seeing the creativity bloom was one thing. Seeing that energy and passion go into the actual building was even better. The team attacked the job of turning a vision into a real product. They worked extremely hard, used the tools we gave them to the fullest, and pushed and supported each other the whole way. It was so exciting to be part of.

Build forthe people who run the work

Agency work keeps changing, and the software has to keep up. When we surveyed 259 agencies for our 2026 Creative Industry Trends Report, the functions they most wanted to automate were project management, then expense tracking and invoicing, then reporting. That isn’t the creative work. That’s the admin around it, and it’s what Frankly takes on.

Frankly is one system for everything an agency runs on: projects, time, capacity, estimating and invoicing in one place, with the financial picture live as the work runs.

Yes, it has AI built in, and each agency decides how much of it touse. But the AI isn’t the point. The point is the work that comes off people’s plates, and that it’s built around how agencies actually run.

Here’s what that looks like. A new brief lands on a Thursday afternoon.

Usually someone opens three tools, checks who’s free, builds a schedule line by line and hopes the numbers hold. In Frankly, you paste in the brief and it drafts the schedule for you to review. You can see whether you have room for the work before you say yes to it, with approved time off already taken out of capacity. When someone finishes a task, Frankly asks how long it took and files the time for them. When you want to know how the month is tracking, you ask in your own words and the report gets built for you.

And people stay in control. Frankly shows the whole change beforeanything happens, and nothing is written until someone accepts it.

It’s built to scale and to respond, because that’s what ourcustomers do too.

For Function Point and FunctionFox customers, nothing changes today. Both products stay fully supported, and if Frankly fits where an agency is headed, our team will guide the move.

FrequentlyAsked Questions About Frankly

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What is Frankly? Frankly is Function Software’s agency platform. It brings everything you run your agency on into one place: projects, time, capacity, estimating, and invoicing, with agents that handle the admin so your team can spend their time on the work that actually matters. It’s built on more than fifty years of working along side agencies.

How is Frankly different from Function Point and FunctionFox? Function Point and FunctionFox were built for their time and they’re both fully supported. Frankly is what we would build if we started from scratch today. It’s built on modern architecture, designed around how agencies work now, and built to keep up as agency work keeps changing. It’s not are placement with a new coat of paint. It’s a genuinely different foundation.

What happens to Function Point and FunctionFox customers? Nothing changes today. Both products stay fully supported, with thesame people and the same service those customers already trust. We meet agencies where they are: whichever product you're on, our team supports you there. If Frankly becomes the right fit, we'll guide the move, and there's no pressure to make it.

Who is Frankly built for? Frankly is built for agency owners and the people who run the work: the ones managing projects, tracking capacity, building estimates, and trying to keep the financial picture clear while the work is still running. If you’re currently managing those things across multiple tools, Frankly was built with you in mind.

Why now? Agency work keeps changing. The expectations clients bring, the speed of delivery, the variety of what an agency gets asked to do on any given week: all of it has accelerated. Software that was purpose-built ten or twenty years ago can’t always keep up. We built Frankly because we wanted a platform that could.

How do I learn more about Frankly? The best place to start is a conversation. Tell us how your agency runs today and what you’d most want off your plate. Our team will show you where Frankly fits.

If you run an agency, the best place to start is a conversation. Tell us how your agency works today and where it’s headed, bring your hardest questions, and we’ll show you where Frankly fits. Book a time to talk with our team.

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We built Frankly so creative people can spend more of their time on the work they love. I can’t wait for more people to see what this team has made!

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