A customer portal is the difference between answering the same 'what's the status?' email forty times and having clients log in to see it themselves. Shipkit builds custom customer portals for agencies, service businesses, and SaaS products — with authentication, project visibility, billing, file sharing, and the integrations your team already depends on.
Step 1
Map the current client workflow — what eats your team's time today
Step 2
Define portal scope: what clients see, what they can do, what stays internal
Step 3
Build authentication, core dashboards, and the highest-leverage workflows first
Step 4
Integrate billing, file storage, and notifications; deploy and onboard first clients
Proof point
Shipkit has shipped client-facing portals and internal tools for service businesses, agencies, and product teams. The customer portal pattern is a frequent fit for service businesses scaling past 20-30 active clients where email and shared docs stop working.
Buy if your workflow fits Clientvenue, SuiteDash, Copilot, or HoneyBook — these are good defaults under 50 clients. Build custom when your services have unique workflows, you need deep integration with your existing tools (CRM, project management, accounting), or you've outgrown the SaaS portal and are paying $300+/month for limited customization. Shipkit's fixed-price builds often pay back the off-the-shelf SaaS in 12-18 months.
A focused portal (auth, project status, document sharing) starts at $14,900. Wider scope — billing, notifications, multiple user roles, integrations — is a custom platform build from $24,900. Enterprise customer portal development with complex permissions, multi-tenant data, audit logs, or industry-specific compliance starts at $30,000+. Shipkit quotes fixed price after a scoping call so the total is locked before development.
Yes. Common integrations include Stripe for billing, QuickBooks/Xero for accounting, Slack/email for notifications, HubSpot or Salesforce for CRM, and Google Drive or S3 for document storage. Webhooks and API access are part of the standard build so future integrations don't require us.
Yes. Logistics customer portal development, enterprise customer portal development, and customer portals for service businesses in regulated industries are common Shipkit projects. Compliance scope (HIPAA, SOC 2 readiness, audit logging) is scoped during the planning call and reflected in the fixed price.
You do, from day one. Code and IP ownership are yours from the start of every Shipkit project, not at the end — full source code, repository, deployment access, and documentation included. No vendor lock-in, no monthly platform fees beyond your own infrastructure.
4-6 weeks for a Production MVP portal from $14,900 — authentication, client dashboards and the one workflow that eats your team's time today. 6-9 weeks for a Custom Platform from $24,900, where billing, several user roles and a set of integrations all land in version one. What moves the range is the number of systems the portal has to talk to, not the number of screens.
In four milestone payments against a fixed price: 30% at kickoff, 30% on approved UX and architecture, 30% on staging acceptance, 10% at production handoff. There is no hourly billing, and the price is agreed after scoping and before the build starts, so the figure you approve is the figure invoiced.
Book a free founder call. We'll help you figure out what to build first, what it'll cost, and how fast we can launch it.
Limited availability — email alex@shipkit.us or use the contact page to start the conversation.
