Four ways to give clients a portal, and what each one really costs

There are four routes: a shared Drive folder, a stack you assemble yourself, dedicated portal software, and a custom build. The gap between the cheapest and the dearest is enormous. The gap in what you owe your clients afterwards is nil.

Every competitor price below was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 7 September 2026, and ClientLoop’s own row was updated for its new plans on 27 September 2026; each is quoted with the plan name. Prices displayed in US dollars are quoted in dollars — converting them would only add a made-up exchange rate to a figure that will move anyway.

1. Count three numbers before you price anything

Clients onboarded per month. Documents per client. Collections open at the same time.

The third one is what several vendors bill against, and it is the one firms cannot answer. Check: if you can’t answer it from memory or a spreadsheet, count last month before you read on. A firm with two collections open at a time is looking at a different winner than a firm with forty.

2. Price the shared folder — including the free version, honestly

Google Workspace Business Starter is £4.72 per user per month and Business Standard £8.26, both promotional rates for new customers on the first 20 users through 21 December 2026; after that the page lists £5.90 and £11.80. Storage is 30 GB per user on Starter, 2 TB on Standard. A personal Google account is £0.

The decision: the paid one buys you a processor contract. Google’s Cloud Data Processing Addendum is incorporated into a Google Workspace agreement automatically. A personal Google account is not a Workspace agreement, so it does not carry those terms. That, not the storage, is the difference between the free version of this route and the paid one.

Check: name every former client who can still open a folder you shared. If you can’t produce that list in five minutes, this route has already failed — and it failed on link hygiene, not on the software.

Genuinely sufficient when: a handful of onboardings a month, a naming convention someone else could follow, and someone who revokes access when a matter closes.

3. Price the assembled stack — then count the vendors

A form tool plus storage plus something to glue them together. Jotform’s free Starter plan gives 5 active forms, 100 monthly submissions and 100 MB of upload space; Bronze is $39/month or $408/year; Silver is $49/month or $468/year, with 10 GB of upload space. Add Workspace underneath it and you are at roughly the cost of the software route with more moving parts.

The decision: every vendor you add is another processor and another contract you have to obtain, read and keep current. Two is manageable. Four is a permanent admin job you gave yourself.

Check: write the list of vendors that will touch client data before you sign the first one.

4. Price dedicated software against the limit, not the headline

Product	Entry plan	Price at time of writing	What the plan actually limits
Clinked	Start Up	$11 per user/month	per user; 200 GB — Standard is $239/month for 100 members
SuiteDash	START	$19/month or $180/year	flat; the page states “one price per month/year… NOT per user”
ClientLoop	Essentials	£35/month or £350/year, excl. VAT	flat per workspace; 100 active clients, 2 users, 50 GB; 14-day free trial, no free plan; Pro £69/month for unlimited clients; extra seats £10/seat/month
Content Snare	Basic	$35/month billed annually ($42 monthly)	20 active requests, 2 users, 20 GB, 40 SMS/month

The decision: run your three numbers through the limit column, not the price column. A firm with 300 clients and six live collections is cheapest on a request-metered plan. A firm with 30 clients and forty live collections is cheapest on a flat one. Per-user pricing only bites once you add staff.

Features differ in ways that matter more than a few pounds. Content Snare’s plans include an SMS allowance; ClientLoop’s reminders are email and in-app only. Check that against how your clients actually reply to you.

ClientLoop is ours, so weigh that row accordingly and price the other three yourself.

5. Price the build honestly — the build is the cheap part

The median UK web developer daily contract rate is £494, according to IT Jobs Watch for the six months to 7 September 2026 — but that figure rests on only 16 quoted rates, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a quote. Authentication, upload handling, storage, notifications and an admin view is weeks of work, not days. Then hosting. Then, every year, the patching.

The decision: you are not buying a portal, you are hiring its maintenance in perpetuity. Check: name the person who applies a security patch to it in year three. If the answer is “we’d find someone”, price that.

6. Ask for the DPA before you ask for the demo

Whoever holds the documents, the ICO is clear that a controller using a processor needs a written contract setting out eight specific matters: documented instructions, duty of confidence, appropriate security, sub-processors, data subjects’ rights, assisting the controller, end-of-contract provisions, and audits and inspections.

Check: read the vendor’s agreement against those eight. A vendor who cannot send it the same day has told you how the rest of the relationship will go.

7. Accept the part that does not move

The ICO also requires that the terms make clear it is the controller, not the processor, that has overall control of what happens to the personal data. That is you, on all four routes. The shared folder does not make Google responsible for your clients. The custom build makes you both parties at once, which is worse, not better.

So: price the route against your real volume, not against the demo. The free route is defensible for a small book with disciplined access reviews. The software route earns its money the moment you cannot say who still has a link. The build almost never earns its money, and the reason is the third year, not the first.