Teamwork.com and Productive both let an agency invite clients into its project management tool at no extra cost: Teamwork advertises "Unlimited Free Client Users" and Productive's help centre says clients "don't count toward your subscription cost". For many agencies, that makes the cheapest client portal the one they already pay for, and it is the option most buy-or-build comparisons skip.
This guide prices four routes for an agency: the PM tool you already use, a portal product, a portal built on Webflow with Wized, and a custom Next.js build. Subscription prices come from vendor pages read on 28 October 2026. Developer time is priced from ITJobsWatch's UK contract rate data, and the effort estimates are ours, labelled as such.
The four routes, in one table
An agency client portal usually does five jobs: shows project status, hands over files, collects approvals, takes new requests and holds invoices or reports. Each route covers those jobs differently.
| Route | Examples | What you get | Running cost as listed | Build effort |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PM tool with free client users | Teamwork.com, Productive | Clients see projects and tasks inside your tool | Nothing extra if you already pay for seats | A few days of setting permissions |
| Portal product | SuiteDash, ManyRequests, Assembly | Branded portal, requests, files, often billing | $15 to $129 a month for our scenario | A few days of setup and templates |
| Webflow with Wized | Webflow, Wized, Supabase | Your own design on your own domain, data in your database | About $109 a month | Weeks, our estimate below |
| Custom code | Next.js, Supabase, Vercel | Anything you can specify, server-side rules | About $45 a month | Weeks to months, our estimate below |
Sources: vendor pricing and product pages read 2026-10-28; build effort is our estimate
Our earlier post Client Portal Software in 2026: 12 Options Compared on Permissions, Branding and Price covers the portal products in depth. This page is about the decision before that one: whether an agency should buy at all.
Start with the tool you already pay for
Most agencies run delivery in a project management tool. If clients can log in to it, the portal question may already be answered.
| Tool | How clients are counted | What clients can do | Staff price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teamwork.com | "Unlimited Free Client Users" | Comment, add tasks and milestones, log time, with access set per client | Basics $9.99, Accelerate $24.99 per user a month billed annually, minimums of 3 and 5 users |
| Productive | Clients "don't count toward your subscription cost" | "Very limited, filtered access" to projects and tasks | Shows both $25 and $29 for Professional billed yearly |
| ClickUp | Guest seats: 10 with one paid user on Business, plus 5 per extra paid user | Full, limited or view-only guest access | Business $17 per user a month billed yearly, shown against a regular $25 |
Sources: Teamwork.com pricing and client users pages, Productive help centre and pricing page, ClickUp pricing page, all read 2026-10-28. Vendor-sourced figures.
What you give up. None of these pages mention a custom domain or removing the vendor's branding from the client view. Clients log in to your PM tool, with its name and its interface. For many B2B clients that is fine; they care that the status is current, not whose logo is on the login screen.
What you gain. One source of truth: the status a client sees is the status your team works from.
The risk. A PM tool shows clients your workspace, not a curated view of it. Productive's own feature list includes "Hide comments from clients", which tells you what happens by default. Before inviting anyone, set up one test client account and click through everything it can see.
When a portal product earns its subscription
A separate portal product makes sense when you want the client view to look like your agency, when clients submit work as requests, or when billing belongs in the same place.
SuiteDash lists Start at $19 a month or $180 a year with "UNLIMITED Clients & Staff for all Plans", marked with an asterisk, and "Extreme White Labeling" from the first plan. It is the cheapest branded portal on list price, bundled with CRM and invoicing you may not want.
ManyRequests is built for agencies that sell productised services: clients submit and track requests. Pro is $79 a month billed annually and removes the "Powered by" line. Its plan cards show one seat included with extra seats at $25 a month, while its limits table shows ten seats included. For three staff that is either $79 or $129 a month, so ask before you sign.
Assembly, formerly Copilot, states in its FAQ that Starter is $29 a month billed annually. Custom domains and removing the Assembly badge start on Professional, which includes three internal users and 500 active contacts. The Professional price did not render in a readable form when we fetched the page, so check it on the day.
The shared weakness: the portal becomes a second system, and project status has to be copied across unless an integration does it. Test that integration during the trial.
What building costs: tooling is cheap, time is not
Building means owning the code, the data and the upkeep. The subscriptions are the small part.
Webflow with Wized. Webflow's own User Accounts were sunset on 29 January 2026, and Webflow named Outseta and Memberstack as its recommended replacements. Wized adds app logic to a Webflow site and connects to backends such as Supabase. On list prices, Webflow Premium is $25 a month billed yearly, Wized Medium $59 a month per domain billed yearly, and Supabase Pro from $25 a month: about $109 a month. We chose Wized Medium because Wized counts every wired Webflow element, Small stops at 100, and a portal with lists, uploads, approvals and a request form passes that quickly. Our comparison of Wized against custom code explains the element caps and where Wized's ceiling sits.
Custom Next.js. Supabase Pro from $25 a month plus one Vercel Pro developer seat at $20 comes to about $45 a month. Vercel says its Hobby plan "is for personal, non-commercial use", so a client portal needs Pro. If you are choosing the backend, our post on Xano versus Supabase compares the two.
The labour. ITJobsWatch puts the UK median React developer contract rate at £525 a day for the six months to 28 October 2026, from 139 quoted rates, with the 10th percentile at £386 and the 90th at £938. It is a UK contract market figure, so treat it as a proxy for what a developer day costs you, in-house or bought in.
| Route | Subscriptions over 36 months | Developer days, our estimate | Labour at £525 a day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Teamwork.com, already in use | $0 extra | 2 to 3 to set up | £1,050 to £1,575 |
| SuiteDash Start, yearly | $540 | 3 to 5 to set up | £1,575 to £2,625 |
| ManyRequests Pro, annual | $2,844 to $4,644 | 3 to 5 to set up | £1,575 to £2,625 |
| Webflow, Wized Medium, Supabase Pro | About $3,924 | 15 to 25 to build, 18 to 54 upkeep | £17,325 to £41,475 |
| Next.js, Supabase Pro, Vercel Pro | About $1,620 | 25 to 40 to build, 18 to 54 upkeep | £22,575 to £49,350 |
Sources: vendor list prices read 2026-10-28; ITJobsWatch UK React developer contract median; developer days are our estimates, with upkeep at half a day to one and a half days a month. Currencies are kept separate on purpose.
These day counts are how we would scope a portal with sign-in, per-client files, approvals, requests and invoices. Yours will differ; the shape will not: once you build, labour is 80% or more of the three-year total at any recent exchange rate, and upkeep can cost as much as the build.
The double-entry tax
The cost that decides most agency portals is not on any pricing page. It is the time spent keeping a separate portal in step with the tool the team actually works in.
As an illustration, not a measurement: if an account manager spends ten minutes a week per client copying status, files and dates into a portal, 30 clients cost five hours a week, about 250 hours a year. Swap in your own numbers. If the result is larger than the subscription, either choose a portal that integrates with your PM tool, use the PM tool's own client access, or build a portal that reads from the PM tool's API instead of holding its own copy.
That last option is the strongest argument for building: one branded view that pulls status, files and invoices from the tools you already use. It is also the hardest version, because every integration is a dependency you maintain.
Adoption is the other half. Our client portal adoption statistics show that people use a portal most when the provider actively encourages it. A portal that is always a week out of date gives clients a reason to email instead.
Signals that decide it
Buy, or use your PM tool, when the portal exists to reduce status emails and hand over files, your clients are comfortable logging in to a third-party tool, and the agency has no developers with spare days. This is most agencies.
Choose Webflow with Wized when your team already builds in Webflow, the portal must match your brand and sit on your domain, the screens mostly read and write records, and a designer will own changes. Keep every permission rule in the backend, for example in Supabase Row Level Security, rather than hiding elements on the page.
Choose custom code when the portal is something clients pay for, holds sensitive data, has permission rules no product can express, or needs to combine data from several systems. Plan for the permission testing. OWASP's 2025 Top 10 reports that 100% of the applications in its data had some form of broken access control, and a client seeing another client's files is the failure that ends agency relationships.
Revisit the decision when client logins pass the plan you are on, a client asks for single sign-on or a data processing agreement the vendor cannot meet, or your team spends more time maintaining the portal than using it.
When the portal is for your client, not for you
The same decision comes up from the other side. A client asks your agency to build them a portal for their own customers, and you have no app developers.
Here the client pays for the build. If a portal product fits, recommending it and charging for setup is honest work. If not, a partner can build it under your name, the way agencies already buy white-label Webflow sites. Our guide to white-label Webflow development covers how that handover works for marketing sites; for a portal we would add a permission test plan and a written upkeep agreement, because a portal needs maintenance in a way a brochure site does not.
Before quoting either way, answer the questions in our Client Portal Requirements Checklist: 40 Questions Across Users, Permissions, Documents and Billing. The answers on roles and data residency move the estimate more than the screen count does.
What this means for your agency's portal
Check your PM tool first. If it gives clients free access and the client view is acceptable, use it for a quarter and count the status emails that stop. If you need your brand and a cleaner view, trial one or two portal products with a friendly client and test the integration with your PM tool. Build only when the portal is part of what you sell, or when no product can express your permission rules, and price the upkeep before you price the screens. Our web apps service page explains how we scope a custom client portal.
