How white labeling works
One company builds the product. Another puts its own name, logo and domain on it and offers it to customers. The end customer may never know who built it.
In B2B software this shows up in two ways.
White-label resale. A partner, often an agency or a managed service provider, sells your product under its own brand as part of its services. The partner usually bills the customer, sets its own price and handles first-line support. You provide the platform, a wholesale price and the ability to remove or replace your branding.
White-label tools. A software vendor lets you put your own branding on what your users or partners see. A white-label partner portal is a common example: partners sign in on your domain and see your logo, not the portal vendor's.
Why companies use it
For partners, white labeling protects their client relationship and lets them build a service around your product without sending clients to another brand. For vendors, it opens a channel that would not exist otherwise, because some agencies and MSPs will only resell products they can present as their own.
What to put in a white-label agreement
- Which branding the partner may remove or replace, and which must stay, such as legal notices.
- Wholesale pricing and any minimum commitment.
- Who supports the end customer and how escalations reach you.
- Who owns customer data and what happens to customers if the agreement ends.
The SaaS reseller agreement template covers most of these terms.
Example
Brightline Agency builds websites for dental clinics. It signs a white-label agreement with an appointment booking vendor at $40 per clinic per month.
Brightline offers booking as "Brightline Book" on its own subdomain, with its logo and colors, and charges clinics $95 a month as part of a support package. Brightline answers clinic questions and escalates technical issues to the vendor. After a year Brightline has 80 clinics on the product, paying the vendor $3,200 a month.