The short answer
Our client portals start at $8,000, and a website on its own starts at $3,000. The price is fixed in a free scope review before any work starts, so the number you agree to is the number you pay. Our portal builds have taken from three weeks to a couple of months.
Quotes you find online run from about $5,000 to well past $100,000. That spread is real, and it comes from a handful of decisions. Once you know them, you can tell which end of the range your portal lands on.
What drives the price
- Who logs in. A portal for customers only is one set of screens. Customers plus staff plus an owner is three, each with its own permissions.
- What customers can see. Job status and history are simple. Live updates, documents, photos, and video take more work.
- Messages. A message thread tied to each job is standard. Replying by text message adds a texting service with its own per-message fees.
- Payments and memberships. Taking payments or selling monthly plans adds Stripe, receipts, and the rules for what members get.
- Booking rules. Offering any time is easy. Only offering times you can actually take, around closed days and how many jobs fit in a slot, takes more.
- Connecting to software you already run. This is the biggest swing. Some shop and field-service tools have clean ways to connect, and some only export files.
- Content the owner edits. If the owner updates the website from the portal without code, that is its own piece of the build.
What is inside the portals we have built
| Build | Who uses it | What's in it |
|---|---|---|
| Colonial Auto Repair | Customers and shop staff | Online booking around open times and closed days, live repair status, messages tied to each appointment, memberships paid through Stripe, and a staff back office with an audit log |
| TaserDesigns | The owner and his customers | Past, current, and upcoming projects in one place, customer records, a client thread with progress photos and approvals, and website content edited from the portal |
| Royal Cantonese | Staff and guests | A point of sale with kitchen and bar displays, phone and delivery orders in one list, pay-at-table for guests, and reservations. Installed in 21 days |
The Colonial portal is the typical shape for a service business: customers on one side, the counter on the other. TaserDesigns took a couple of months and also runs the owner’s website. Royal Cantonese replaced the restaurant’s point of sale, which puts it in the bigger range.
Custom or off the shelf?
If you already pay for field-service or shop software, check whether it includes a customer portal before you build one. Many do, and a portal that comes with software you already run is the cheapest one you will ever have.
Custom makes sense when your customers keep calling about something your software can't show them, when the built-in portal looks like the vendor's brand instead of yours, or when you would be paying for two or three tools to cover one workflow.
How to keep the cost down
- Start with the one thing customers call about most, like repair or job status, and add the rest once it is in use.
- Keep the software you already run and build around it instead of replacing it.
- Skip the app store. A portal that runs in the browser works on every phone without a separate iPhone and Android build.
- Decide the scope before anyone writes code, so the price is fixed and nothing grows quietly.