Custom software
A custom customer portal built around how you already work
A custom customer portal is a secure login where your customers see their own orders, invoices, documents, or job status without emailing you first. We scope it, quote a fixed price, build it in stages against your real systems, and hand you the code. If a tool you already pay for would do the job, we will tell you that instead.
Why owners call about this
The same question, forty times a week
Nobody wakes up wanting a portal. What they want is to stop answering "where's my order" and "can you resend that invoice" all day. Someone in the office is spending half a morning looking things up in one system and pasting them into an email, and everyone has quietly accepted that as the job.
A portal fixes that by letting customers look it up themselves. The catch is that a real one has to pull live data out of the systems you already run, which is where the cost sits and where most projects go wrong. So the first conversation we have is not about design. It is about which of your systems the data lives in, and whether you should be building anything at all.
What we usually find
Staff re-typing order or invoice data out of one system into email
Customers calling to ask for status you already have on a screen
A shared Dropbox folder standing in for a document portal
Spreadsheets emailed back and forth as the record of truth
Account-specific pricing that only two people in the company know
A login page bolted on years ago that nobody trusts anymore
Vendors and subcontractors submitting paperwork by text message
Software you already pay for that has a client login nobody turned on
What we build
Portals, and the plumbing behind them
Most of these look similar after login and are completely different underneath. The shape you need depends on who logs in and what they are allowed to do once they are there.
How it goes
From scoping call to customers logging in
Scope
We map exactly what each type of user sees and does after login, and which of your systems every piece of that data comes from. That map is the whole project.
Fixed quote
You get a written scope and a fixed price before any building starts, so you are not signing up for an open meter. If off-the-shelf would be cheaper, this is where we say so.
Build in stages
The first working version goes in front of real customers early, usually with one account type and the data that matters most. We adjust from what people actually do with it.
Launch and look after it
We host it, monitor it, patch it, and keep the integrations working as the tools on the other end change. The code and the data are yours either way.
Who this is for
Businesses with customers who need to look things up
We build portals for small and mid-size businesses around the Puget Sound and remotely nationwide. If your customer base is small and low-frequency, a portal will not pay for itself and we will say so on the first call.
Straight answers
Questions we get asked most
Straight answers about what a custom portal costs, how long it takes, and when you should buy one instead. If your question is not here, call and ask.
Ask the teamA real custom portal commonly runs $15,000 to $75,000 to build, driven mostly by how many systems it connects to and how much customers can do once they are inside. Connecting it to your existing tools adds roughly $2,000 to $20,000 depending on how cooperative those tools are. You get a fixed price in writing before we start.
Weeks to a few months for most builds, and the range is that wide because integrations decide it, not screens. A portal reading from one system moves quickly. One pulling live data out of an ERP, an accounting package, and a shipping provider takes longer. You will see a working version well before the final one.
For most small businesses, hosted is the right answer. We deploy it on managed cloud infrastructure and handle the servers, backups, certificates, and security updates. Self-hosted makes sense when you already run internal infrastructure with staff who maintain it, or a contract or regulator requires the data to stay in a specific place.
You do. The code, the database, and the customer data are yours outright when the project is done, hosted by us or handed over for you to run yourself. That is the main practical difference between a custom build and renting a no-code platform, where you keep paying to keep the thing switched on.
Each customer gets their own account with a password and, where it matters, two-factor authentication. Permissions decide what each account can see, so one customer never sees another's orders. Traffic is encrypted, passwords are hashed, and admin access is separated from customer access. We write the rules down during scoping rather than guessing later.
Usually, yes. QuickBooks, most mainstream CRMs, shipping providers, and payment processors have APIs we can pull live data from, so the portal shows the same numbers your staff see. Older or on-premise systems are harder and sometimes need a nightly sync instead. We check what your specific tools allow before quoting.
Often, and we would rather you find that out now. If a tool you already pay for has a client login, HubSpot included, turn that on first. Purpose-built platforms like SuiteDash, Knack, or Zoho Creator start around $20 a month and climb into the hundreds as you add users or records, and they cover a lot of ground. Custom starts to win when live data from several systems has to meet in one place.
Software needs upkeep the way a building does. Plan on roughly 15 to 25 percent of the build cost each year for hosting, security patching, dependency updates, and the small changes a business always asks for once people are using it. We can carry that on a monthly plan, or hand everything over if you have your own developers.
Free scoping call
Tell us what your customers keep asking for
Describe the questions eating your week and which systems hold the answers. We will tell you whether a portal is the right call, whether something you already own would do it cheaper, and what a build would cost. Based in Mill Creek, building for businesses across the Puget Sound and nationwide.