How much does a client portal cost?

Your customers email you for an invoice, a status update or a document you have already sent three times. A client portal gives them direct, secure access to that information, and frees up your team’s time. Here is what it costs, how the budget is built, and when you are better off without one.

Price ranges

Amounts exclude VAT and cover a first version in production. The quote becomes fixed after the scoping phase.

For a range that fits your case, the estimator gives you a budget in one minute from the features you select.

How the budget is built

My estimator starts from a base price, adds modules, then applies multipliers. An illustrative example for a complete client portal open to 40 customer and staff accounts:

With an ERP connection (€2,000), multiple languages (€1,000), a dashboard (€1,500) and more than 50 users (×1.2), you get to around $28,600 (€25,500)excl. VAT; premium design (×1.15) brings that toward $32,500 (€29,000)excl. VAT. This is an order of magnitude: the fixed quote follows scoping.

What drives the price

1. Access rights. A customer who sees their own documents is simple. A group with several subsidiaries, users who only see some cases, internal approvals before publishing: each rule adds design and testing. See managing role-based access.
2. Where the data comes from. Documents uploaded by hand in the back office, or pulled automatically from the ERP, accounting or document management system: integrations are often the most variable item.
3. Interactions. View only, or also upload files, sign, pay, open a request and follow its answer.
4. Expected security. Contracts, personal or financial data: two-factor authentication, access logs and EU hosting should be planned from the start. See two-factor authentication and account security.
5. Data migration. Invoice and document history to attach to the right customer accounts.

Measuring what the portal brings in

For a CFO, a client portal is justified by the time it frees up. Before the project, count the recurring requests over one month: invoice copies, case status, documents to resend. Multiply by the average handling time and by the fully loaded hourly cost of the people involved.

An illustrative example, with made-up amounts to replace with your own: 300 requests a month at 10 minutes each is 50 hours a month. At €35 an hour, that comes to €21,000 a year. If the portal absorbs half of them, an $20,200 (€18,000)excl. VAT budget pays for itself in under two years, not counting the convenience for your customers.

Costs after go-live

A custom client portal is not billed per customer account. Recurring costs are:

• hosting, a few tens to a few hundred euros a year, a bit more if your customers upload many large files;
• usage-based third-party services: email sending, online payment, e-signature;
• maintenance and new features, as a fixed fee or by the hour, after the three months of included support.

To compare with off-the-shelf client portal software billed monthly, run the numbers over 3 to 5 years with the total cost of SaaS versus custom method.

When it is not the right solution

• Few customers and few documents: secure file sharing or the client area of your invoicing software may be enough.
• Your business software already offers a decent client portal: turn it on and configure it before building anything.
• The main need is online ordering: what you should price is a B2B portal.

Custom work makes sense when your teams spend hours answering the same requests, when your customers expect precise tracking of their cases, or when the portal needs to reflect your own processes rather than a vendor’s.

How the project works

1. A 30-minute call to understand your customers, the recurring requests and your current tools.
2. Scoping (1 to 2 weeks): scope, access rights, integrations, fixed quote.
3. Clickable mockups (1 to 3 weeks), shown to a few trusted customers.
4. Development in batches: accounts and documents first, then invoices, payment and integrations.
5. Launch to pilot customers, then to everyone, with data migration and training for your teams.

Payment follows the same rhythm: a 50% deposit at the start, the balance according to the schedule in the quote. The source code and rights are transferred to you once paid in full. The solution is described on the client portal page.