What does a client portal cost in 2026? Honest price bands

Introduction

Search for "client portal cost" and you mostly find articles that end with "it depends, request a quote". True, but useless when you need to reserve internal budget. So in this article the real numbers: the price bands we work with at MG Software in Haarlem in 2026, what each band includes, which choices drive the price up hardest, and how to calculate whether the investment pays for itself.

One disclaimer up front: these are indicative ranges from a Dutch development agency, based on our own projects. They are not quotes and not market averages; an agency in central Amsterdam or an offshore party will price differently. What a client portal can actually do for your customers is covered in our earlier article on client portals and self-service. This article is about the euros.

The short version: three price bands for 2026

An MVP portal costs roughly 15,000 to 35,000 euros. For that you get the core: customers log in securely, see the status of their orders, files or projects, and can view and upload documents. One customer role, one administrator role, and data that is maintained manually or through a simple import. This is the starting point for companies that mainly want to remove the daily stream of status questions.

A standard portal with one or two integrations costs roughly 35,000 to 75,000 euros. The difference from the MVP is mostly automation: the portal pulls invoices, orders or file data live from your accounting package, ERP or CRM, customers receive automatic notifications, and there are multiple roles with their own permissions. This is the band most of our portal projects fall into.

An advanced portal with multiple roles and workflows costs 75,000 to 150,000 euros or more. Think of portals where customers, employees and external parties such as accountants or subcontractors work together, with approval flows, signing, payments or a customer-specific reporting module. In this band the portal is no longer an addition to your operations but a load-bearing part of them. Again: these are indications for the Dutch market in 2026, not quotes.

What an MVP includes, and what it deliberately leaves out

The art of a good MVP portal is not cramming in as many features as the budget allows, but leaving out the right ones. In practice an MVP consists of four building blocks: a secure login, a status overview, document sharing and an admin environment where your team manages users and data. That intercepts the vast majority of the calls and emails currently eating time.

What is deliberately left out: integrations pulling live data, multiple customer roles, a native mobile app, elaborate notification flows. Not because those are nonsense, but because they double the price while you do not yet know how your customers will use the portal. Our experience is that the wish list three months after go-live always looks different from the one drawn up in advance; it is a waste to pay for features that turn out to sit at the bottom of it.

An MVP is therefore not half a product but a sequencing choice. The architecture does need to be built from day one so that integrations and roles can be added; a portal that has to be rebuilt for that was not an MVP but a dead end. Ask about this explicitly with every quote: what will step two cost later?

The five dials that set the price

Dial one: authentication. A password login is the baseline; two-factor authentication, single sign-on with Microsoft or Google, or eHerkenning for Dutch business users each add work. Dial two: integrations, by far the biggest variable, more on that below. Dial three: roles and permissions. Every additional role, customer, employee, accountant, subcontractor, means its own screens, its own permissions and its own testing effort.

Dial four: mobile. A responsive web portal that works well on any phone is included in all the bands above. A separate native app for the App Store and Play Store is a project of its own that quickly adds tens of thousands of euros, and it is rarely necessary: for most portals the mobile browser is more than sufficient.

Dial five, and this one is gaining weight fast in 2026: compliance. If you supply organisations in scope of the Dutch Cybersecurity Act, they impose requirements on logging, encryption and access management for every system holding their data, so also on your client portal. Including those requirements from the start costs a limited percentage extra; retrofitting them is a renovation.

Integrations: the biggest cost item after the core

The difference between a 25,000 euro portal and a 60,000 euro portal rarely sits in the screens and almost always in the integrations. A portal that pulls invoices and order statuses live from Exact Online saves your team duplicate work and your customer outdated information, but requires API authentication, error handling, synchronisation logic and monitoring. How such an integration works in practice is described in our article on integrating Exact Online with your own software.

Our rule of thumb: budget 5,000 to 15,000 euros extra per serious integration with an accounting package, ERP or CRM, depending on the quality of the API and the amount of logic needed on top. A modern REST API with good documentation sits at the bottom of that band; a legacy package that only talks through file exports sits at the top. You will find more examples on our page about software integrations.

A savings tip: not every integration needs to be realtime. For invoices and documents a nightly synchronisation is often fine, and it is considerably simpler and therefore cheaper than a live two-way connection. Start with the integration that removes the most manual work and add the rest when usage justifies it.

The maths: what a portal delivers

"The best predictor of portal ROI is not the feature count, but how many calls and emails per week it makes unnecessary. Count those first, build after."

— Jordan Munk, co-founder MG Software

The returns of a client portal sit in three places: fewer recurring questions, fewer manual actions and a more professional customer experience. The first two can be quantified in advance. For one week, count how many status questions, document requests and "could you email that again" requests your team handles and how many minutes they take on average. At our clients this rarely adds up to less than half a full-time position of hidden work.

A concrete example from our own practice: for an installation company in the Haarlem region we built a portal where business customers view the status of their projects, schedules and invoices themselves. Before go-live, the office answered dozens of calls and emails with exactly those questions every day; the portal took over the majority of them, and the freed-up hours went into quotes and planning instead of look-up work. The investment sat in the middle price band and paid for itself within eighteen months.

At the same time, be realistic about the limits of self-service. A Gartner survey of more than 5,000 customers found that only 14 percent of service issues are fully resolved in self-service. The lesson is not that portals do not work, but that you should design for the questions that suit self-service, status, documents, standard changes, and for a smooth handover to your team when things get complex. A portal that traps customers in a maze without an exit costs trust instead of building it.

Running costs and how to judge a quote

A portal is not a one-off purchase. Budget for ongoing costs covering hosting and monitoring, security updates of frameworks and dependencies, and small improvements based on user feedback. A common rule of thumb is 10 to 20 percent of the build cost per year. Distrust offers without a maintenance story: an unmanaged portal holding customer data is not a saving in 2026 but a liability.

When comparing quotes, these are the four things we would check if we were buying ourselves. Does it state exactly which roles, integrations and security measures are included? Is there a line item for data migration from your current way of working? What does a change after delivery cost, per hour or through a support bundle? And who owns the source code? The answer to that last one should be simple: you do.

The best preparation for a sharp quote is a concise functional design that puts roles, processes and integrations on paper. How to approach that, including the chapter structure we use ourselves, is covered in our functional design template. Agencies quoting against the same document price the same scope, and only then do price differences become meaningful.

Conclusion

So what does a client portal cost in 2026? As an indication: 15,000 to 35,000 euros for an MVP with login, status and documents; 35,000 to 75,000 euros for a standard portal with one or two integrations; and 75,000 to 150,000 euros or more for an advanced portal with multiple roles and workflows. The biggest price dials are integrations, roles, authentication and compliance requirements, and the payback period stands or falls with the amount of manual work the portal actually removes.

Want a first range for your situation within two minutes? Use our calculator. Rather talk through your process directly and see which price band fits? Get in touch, or first read how we build web applications from first sketch to go-live.