Every service business eventually faces the same problem: clients calling and emailing to ask for updates on their work, documents scattered across email threads, invoices sent as PDF attachments, and status information that lives inside your internal systems, invisible to the people paying for the work.
A client-facing portal solves all of this at once: it gives each client a private, branded space where they can track their projects, access shared documents, view invoices, submit requests, and communicate with your team, without ever picking up the phone. The office gets fewer interruptions. Clients get a more professional experience. Everyone saves time.
The real question is how to build one, and which platform makes commercial sense for your business. In this article we compare four routes, fully custom development, Hubflo, Glide App, and Noloco, using a concrete real-world scenario: a service company with 100 active clients and 10 internal staff. The cost differences are significant, and so are the differences in what each option can deliver.
What a Client Portal Actually Needs
Before comparing costs, it helps to be specific about the feature set a serious client portal for a service business needs to deliver:
- Secure per-client login, each client sees only their own data
- Live project and job status pulled from your internal systems
- Document sharing, proposals, contracts, reports, certificates, all in one place
- Two-way messaging, structured communication tied to the client record
- Client file upload, clients can submit documents or photos your team needs
- Invoice and billing visibility
- Mobile access, clients must be able to use the portal on a phone
- Branded experience, your logo and colours, not the platform's
- Role-based access control for your internal team
The Scenario
All cost comparisons in this article use the same benchmark: a service company with 100 active clients per month and 10 internal staff (account managers, admins, and project leads). This is a realistic size for a growing Irish SME in logistics, professional services, maintenance, or facilities management, large enough that a manual approach has clearly broken down, but still firmly in SME territory.
Option 1: Fully Custom Development
A bespoke client portal built from scratch gives you complete control and full integration with any internal system. You own the code. It does exactly what you specify. There are no platform constraints.
The cost, however, is prohibitive for most SMEs. A secure multi-tenant portal, with per-client login, live data integration, document storage, two-way messaging, invoice display, and a mobile-responsive interface, requires a team of two to three developers (backend, frontend, and project lead/QA) working for two to three months at Irish day rates of €450–€650 per developer per day.
Build cost: €75,000 – €120,000+
Plus annual maintenance at 15–20% of build cost (€11,250–€22,500/year) to cover security patches, operating system updates, and feature changes. Every new feature requires a developer engagement. Every integration requires custom work. Over five years, the total cost of ownership reaches €131,000–€232,000, before any growth-related changes.
| Cost Item | Custom Development |
|---|---|
| Initial build | €75,000 – €120,000+ |
| Annual maintenance (15–20%) | €11,250 – €22,500 / yr |
| 5-year TCO | €131,000 – €232,000+ |
Option 2: Hubflo
Hubflo is a purpose-built client portal SaaS platform designed for service businesses. It covers the essential client portal features well, file sharing, messaging, project tracking, forms, billing, and client onboarding, with a clean, polished interface. For businesses whose client workflows match what Hubflo was designed for, it is a genuine option.
Hubflo Pricing for Our Scenario
For a company with 100 clients and 10 internal staff, the relevant plan is the Unlimited Bundle at $349/month, which is what most growing service businesses need (unlimited clients, custom domain, workflow automation, advanced integrations). However, the Unlimited plan only includes 4 internal team seats. With 10 staff, you need 6 additional seats at $56/month each. And since most clients will access the portal from a phone, the mobile app add-on at $79/month is effectively mandatory, it is a separate charge, not included in any plan.
Real monthly cost for 100 clients + 10 staff:
Unlimited Bundle: $349/month
6 extra team seats × $56: $336/month
Mobile app add-on: $79/month
Total: $764/month ≈ €700/month ≈ €8,400/year
This is a significant ongoing cost. And it will rise further if your team grows, since every additional staff member beyond the included four adds $56/month.
Where Hubflo Excels, and Where It Falls Short
Hubflo's key strength is that clients are unlimited on the Unlimited plan. If your client base grows to 300 or 500, the monthly cost does not change. This makes it genuinely attractive for businesses with a very large and growing client base whose portal needs are primarily standard, file sharing, messaging, progress tracking, billing. If that describes your business, Hubflo is worth a serious look.
The limitation is that Hubflo has a fixed portal structure. You configure within the options the platform provides, but you cannot fundamentally customise what clients see, how data flows, or how the portal integrates with your operational systems. If your clients need live data from your CRM, job management tool, or database, Hubflo cannot display that natively, you would need to maintain a manual update process or build and maintain an integration.
| Cost Item | Hubflo (100 clients + 10 staff) |
|---|---|
| Unlimited Bundle base | $349 / month |
| 6 extra staff seats × $56 | $336 / month |
| Mobile app add-on (mandatory for mobile clients) | $79 / month |
| Total monthly | $764 ≈ €700 / month |
| Annual cost | ~€8,400 / yr |
| 5-year TCO | ~€42,000 – €44,000 |
Option 3: Glide App
Glide is a powerful low-code platform well suited to internal tools, field service apps, and small-team client portals. For the right use case, a small team with a limited number of external users, it delivers excellent customisation at a reasonable cost. However, its pricing model creates a significant problem for any service business with a substantial client base.
The Per-User Problem at Scale
Glide's Business plan is $249/month and includes 20 users. Every additional user, whether they are a staff member or a client accessing the portal, costs $5/month. This flat per-user charge applies regardless of role: your account managers and your clients are billed identically.
For our scenario of 100 clients and 10 staff (110 users total), the calculation is stark:
Real monthly cost for 100 clients + 10 staff:
Business plan (20 users included): $249/month
90 extra users × $5/month: $450/month
Total: $699/month ≈ €642/month ≈ €7,700/year
Plus the one-off build cost of €2,000–€5,000. As your client base grows, costs rise linearly: 200 clients would add another $500/month. Glide becomes increasingly expensive the more clients you serve.
Glide is an excellent choice for service businesses with a small or fixed number of external portal users, a dedicated B2B operation serving twenty regular clients, for example. But for any business where the client base is large or growing, the per-user pricing model makes Glide financially unsuitable as a client portal platform.
| Cost Item | Glide (100 clients + 10 staff) |
|---|---|
| One-off build cost | €2,000 – €5,000 |
| Business plan (20 users included) | $249 / month |
| 90 extra users × $5/month (clients + staff) | $450 / month |
| Total monthly | $699 ≈ €642 / month |
| Annual running cost | ~€7,700 / yr |
| 5-year TCO | ~€40,500 – €43,500 |
Option 4: Noloco, The Recommended Choice
Noloco is a low-code app builder specifically designed for client portals and internal tools, built around connected data sources. It sits in the same category as Glide but with a fundamentally different, and far more favourable, pricing model for businesses with a large client base.
Noloco Pricing for Our Scenario
Noloco's Business plan at $213/month (billed annually) includes 30 internal team seats and 100 client seats. For our scenario, 10 staff and 100 clients, the Business plan covers everything exactly, with no additional per-seat charges.
Real monthly cost for 100 clients + 10 staff:
Business plan (30 team seats + 100 client seats): $213/month
Additional users needed: none
Mobile access: included
Total: $213/month ≈ €195/month ≈ €2,340/year
This is a remarkable difference. If the client base grows beyond 100, extra client seats cost just $1/month each, adding 50 more clients increases the monthly bill by $50, not by hundreds.
What Makes Noloco Worth the Setup Investment
The cost advantage is compelling enough on its own. But what distinguishes Noloco from Hubflo, and what makes it our recommended choice for most service businesses, is the depth of customisation it supports:
- Connect to your real data sources, Noloco integrates natively with Airtable, Google Sheets, PostgreSQL, MySQL, HubSpot, Stripe, and other platforms your business already uses. Your client portal shows live data from your operational systems, not a manually maintained copy.
- Record and field-level permissions, granular RBAC that controls not just which pages each user can see, but which individual records and fields are visible to each role. A client sees their own projects; an account manager sees all their assigned clients; an admin sees everything.
- Unlimited apps, build both an internal staff tool and a client-facing portal within the same plan, connected to the same data.
- Custom branding on all plans, custom domain and your own visual identity from day one.
- Forms with validation and e-signatures, clients can submit requests, complete onboarding forms, or sign documents directly in the portal.
- Kanban, calendar, map, and chart views, your clients can see their project pipeline in whichever view makes most sense for the type of work you deliver.
- Custom code support, for edge cases that require logic beyond the platform's native capabilities, Noloco supports custom code injection.
- Barcode scanning, relevant for logistics and warehouse clients who need to interact with inventory records through the portal.
| Cost Item | Noloco (100 clients + 10 staff) |
|---|---|
| One-off build cost | €2,000 – €5,000 |
| Business plan (30 team + 100 client seats) | $213 / month (annual billing) |
| Extra client seats (if needed) | $1 / client / month |
| Total monthly | $213 ≈ €195 / month |
| Annual running cost | ~€2,340 / yr |
| 5-year TCO | €13,700 – €16,700 |
The Full Picture: 5-Year Cost Comparison
| Custom Dev | Hubflo | Glide | Noloco ★ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront / build cost | €75k – €120k+ | €0 – €550 | €2k – €5k | €2k – €5k |
| Annual running cost | €11k – €22k | ~€8,400 | ~€7,700 | ~€2,340 |
| 5-year TCO | €131k – €232k | ~€42k – €44k | ~€40k – €44k | €14k – €17k |
| Custom to your workflow | ✓ Full | ✗ Fixed structure | ✓ Full | ✓ Full |
| Connects to live data sources | ✓ | Partial (API/Zapier) | ✓ | ✓ Native |
| Per-client pricing | None | None (unlimited) | $5/user/month | $1/extra client/month |
| Field & record-level RBAC | ✓ | Limited | ✓ | ✓ Full |
| Mobile app included | ✓ | Add-on: $79/month | ✓ | ✓ Included |
| Best suited for | Large enterprises | Very large client bases, standard features only | Small client bases (<30 users) | Most SMEs: 50–500 clients, custom workflows |
Our Recommendation: Why Noloco Is the Right Choice for Most Service SMEs
Looking at this comparison honestly, the case for Noloco is strong on both cost and capability. Over five years, it costs three times less than Hubflo and Glide for this scenario, and roughly twelve times less than custom development. That gap is large enough to be commercially decisive for any SME.
But cost is not the only reason we recommend it. Noloco combines a pricing model that scales sensibly with client growth, full customisation freedom, and native connections to the data sources most service businesses already use. You are not building around the platform's limitations, you are building a portal that reflects your actual business logic, data structure, and client relationships.
The record and field-level permissions are particularly valuable for service businesses. You can control not just which pages a user can access, but which specific records within a page they can see, so a client sees their own jobs but not another client's, an account manager sees their portfolio but not their colleague's, and an admin has full visibility. This level of granularity is standard in Noloco and is what a real-world multi-client portal requires.
When Hubflo Is the Better Answer
Hubflo earns a place in this comparison because there is a specific scenario where it makes more sense than Noloco: a business with a very large or rapidly growing client base (several hundred or more) whose portal requirements are straightforward, file sharing, messaging, project progress tracking, billing, and basic onboarding. Hubflo's unlimited clients at a flat monthly rate means the cost is entirely predictable regardless of how many clients you add. If your portal does not need deep data integration or bespoke workflows, and client volume is your primary concern, Hubflo's pricing model protects you from rising per-client costs as you scale.
When Glide Is the Right Tool
Glide remains an excellent choice for service businesses where the external user base is small and predictable, a B2B company serving twenty or thirty fixed accounts, for example. In those scenarios, the per-user cost is manageable, and Glide's speed of build and ease of maintenance make it one of the most practical tools available. It is the per-user model applied to a large or growing client base that makes it unsuitable for client portals at scale, not the platform itself.
How Data Sensum Can Help
We build client portals on Noloco, Glide, and custom solutions, and we choose the right tool based on your actual situation. We start with a free productivity audit: a conversation in which we map your current client communication workflow, understand your data sources, and give you an honest recommendation on which platform makes the most commercial and operational sense for your business at its current size and growth trajectory.
If a Noloco portal is the right answer, we can typically have a working prototype in front of your clients within two to three weeks, connected to your live data, branded to your business, and built around the way your team actually works.