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Web applications9 min

A custom client portal for a small business, with the real price and the six weeks it took

What a client portal fixes for a small business, what goes in it, an 11,600 € custom build line by line, and when renting client portal software is enough.

In February the operations manager of a yacht maintenance company in La Ciotat, in the south of France, showed me a WhatsApp thread with 1,140 messages in it, all about one boat, and asked me whether a client portal would have stopped what happened in it. A thumbs-up was the worst of it, as it turned out: the captain had sent one under a 4,200 € quote for shaft bearings and the owner's office in London said he'd never had the right to approve it.

What I told her was more or less what I tell anyone who asks about a client portal, that it's a private page behind a login for each owner, with the jobs on their boat and the quotes waiting for them and their documents and invoices on it, and that I build them from 9,000 € before VAT (a little over $10,000) in four to eight weeks. I also told her a lot of small businesses would do better renting client portal software from $19 a month, and I'll come to which ones.

What a client portal fixes, and what it doesn't

They look after about thirty boats over the winter, and until April each one had its own group with the captain and sometimes the owner in it, so she knew exactly where everything was supposed to be; she just couldn't find any of it when it mattered.

It wasn't really the number of messages that was the problem, it was that nothing in a WhatsApp thread has a status, so a thumbs-up from a captain looked the same as a signed quote and a photo of a pitted propeller from November looked as urgent as the one from that morning. Every Friday afternoon the three of them in the office went back through about thirty threads to type each owner a summary of the week, and most of the owners didn't open it, since it came as a Word attachment and they read their mail on their phones.

The people selling portals mostly talk about self-service, meaning your clients find their own answers and stop calling you, and I'm less sure about that than they are. Gartner surveyed 5,728 customers in December 2023 and found that only 14% of their service issues had been fully resolved in self-service, and only 36% even of the ones the customers themselves called very simple. When it failed, 43% of the time it was because people couldn't find anything relevant to their problem.

A help page behind a login doesn't change any of that. At the yard the owners don't search for anything. They open the portal and their own boat is on the first screen with whatever is waiting for them at the top.

It won't do much if nobody in the office answers messages to begin with, and if your clients come once for one job then a login only gets in their way, which is why I ask the two questions in the guide to custom web application development before I build anything people have to log in to.

What goes in it

The first owner to log in was the one with the bearings, from his apartment in Geneva, on a Sunday evening in April, and the manager could see from the log that he spent eleven minutes in it, most of them looking at photos. The photos are on the main screen, which is just the boat, sorted under whichever job they were taken for, with every job on the boat and where it's at. On the Monday he approved two quotes he'd left unanswered since February, the bearings being one of them.

Quotes have a screen of their own. The captain can still accept small things himself, anything up to 2,000 €, and above that the button just isn't there for him and the quote goes to the owner, which is what the London office had wanted from the start. The documents, the balance and a thread per job are on the other three screens.

There was a dashboard with charts in her first list as well. I asked which of the owners had ever wanted a chart from her and she said not one of them in eleven years, so it came out of the quote and nobody has asked about it since.

She also wanted to know about an AI assistant to answer the owners in the evenings, which she'd read about somewhere, and I said maybe next year, because an agent only knows what's written down, and at that point everything about her boats was written down in WhatsApp and nowhere else. There's more about that in the post explaining AI agents to business owners.

Nobody has a password. The owner types in his email and gets a link that keeps him logged in for thirty days, because I couldn't see a man in Geneva making up a password for his boatyard, and Baymard Institute found that once you leave out the people who were only browsing, 18% of US shoppers who abandoned an order online did it because the site wanted them to create an account. Those people were trying to buy something.

The price, line by line

It came to 11,600 € before VAT. The biggest line was the five screens at 3,200 €, then 2,400 € for the logins and who's allowed to see and approve what, and the day on site was 900 €, half of it on the dock with two of the captains. The mockup was 1,600 €. Getting invoices out of their invoicing software and into the portal the minute they're issued cost 1,400 € (it has an API, thankfully, if a bad one), the approval record 1,100 €, and the last 1,000 € went into loading the paperwork for thirty boats, more or less by hand, then testing and switching over.

The permissions are what took it over my 9,000 € starting price, since owners, captains and the management companies that run some of the boats all see different things and can approve different amounts, and every extra kind of user means a few more days of work. I've gone into what else moves the number in the post on custom software development cost.

Hosting, backups and updates cost them 140 € a month, most of it for storing photos, because the workshop photographs everything.

Six weeks

I went down to the dock for the day on site in the second week of March, and the mistral was up, so I spent most of the morning holding the laptop down with one hand. The older captain has been on that boat nine years. He told me straight away he hadn't opened an email since about 2019. He does everything on WhatsApp and wasn't going to change for a portal, which is fair, so when the portal needs him it sends him a WhatsApp with a link in it and he answers there. That got about a week of complaints out of him, and then nothing.

The mockup took weeks two and three and the building weeks four and five, and week six was the bad one. The accountant at the family office in London told us she'd never had a single login email, and she was right: their mail filter had been putting every one of them in quarantine as phishing, and since their IT is outsourced it took nine days to get the yard's address allowed through.

In the meantime I added a code by text message as a second way in. Nobody had mentioned the filter to me and I hadn't thought to ask about it, which I do now.

It's been live since April. I asked the manager in August whether owners were paying any faster and she said she'd have to check, and phoned me back the next day with twenty-three days on average over the summer against fifty-two the winter before, then said July and August are always better anyway, so I wouldn't make much of it either.

When SaaS is enough

This past spring a bookkeeper in Cassis called me about a custom portal and I talked her out of it in about ten minutes, because her clients send her receipts and sign their year-end accounts and pay her, and that's all, which is what the rented ones are built for. She has about two hundred clients, so I sent her the SuiteDash page, since even their $19 plan doesn't charge per client. She signed up for that one in May.

She'd been looking at Assembly as well, Copilot as it was called until September 2025, but the Starter plan there stops at fifty clients, at $29 a month paid yearly or $49 monthly.

The 11,600 € the yard paid me would cover her plan for more than fifty years, and that's before my hosting fee. I think most bookkeepers and designers and architects are in her position.

I'd only build one when the thing at the center of the portal doesn't exist in any of the products, and none of them had a boat with jobs and photos per job and an approval limit for each person on it. Same if it has to work with software you're keeping and the SaaS won't connect to it, or if the subscription keeps going up with every client you sign. I've put the subscription and the build side by side with real numbers in the post on custom software for small businesses.

Whoever builds yours, get the code put in a repository in your own name, the way the yard's is. Client portals sit with the other web applications on the services page, and you can book a 15-minute call if you want to talk about yours.

FAQ

What is a client portal?

The part of your website behind a login where each client sees their own job, documents and invoices and nobody else's. The yard's has one page per boat, in place of a WhatsApp group per boat. Businesses with lots of small customers often say customer portal instead.

How much does a custom client portal cost?

I charge from 9,000 € before VAT, a little over $10,000, and it takes me four to eight weeks if there's one kind of client and one bit of software to connect it to. The yard's was 11,600 € with three kinds of user. Hosting's extra, 140 € a month for them.

What is the best client portal software for a small business?

Whichever one your trade already uses, more often than not, so ask a couple of people who do what you do. The bookkeeper in Cassis pays $19 a month for SuiteDash, which doesn't count clients, and Assembly's Starter plan is $29 a month paid yearly for up to fifty. Try one for a month before you pay anybody to build you a portal, me included.

Is a client portal more secure than email?

For invoices, mostly, yes. The family office in London nearly paid a fake 18,600 € invoice in the yard's name into a fraudster's account in October 2025 (the email came from a domain with one letter too many), and in 2024 the FBI got complaints adding up to $2.77 billion lost to that sort of business email compromise. Since the portal went in, the yard's bank details aren't in any email at all.

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