Anyone who wants a customer portal built asks about the build price first. That is understandable, because it is the number in the quote. Over the lifetime of a portal, though, it is the smallest. The larger amount comes after launch, month after month, and appears nowhere in most quotes.
Here we disclose both: our prices for build and operation, and what the AWS bill of two portals we run in production ourselves actually came to in September 2026.
The short answer
| Item | Price |
|---|---|
| Portal sketch, one day | CHF 1’600 fixed, credited against the build |
| Build | from CHF 12’000 |
| Operation | from CHF 1’500 per month |
| AWS bill of the production environment, measured | USD 9 to 17 per month |
The build from CHF 12’000 applies to a portal with login, separate areas per customer, documents, status and invoices, attached to your existing site. What it costs in your case is clarified in one day by the portal sketch. At the end there is a fixed price for the build, and the CHF 1’600 is credited against it if you have it built with us within three months.
What the build price depends on
The price hangs on three questions.
Which data goes in and where it comes from. A portal your team uploads documents to by hand is faster to build than one that pulls invoices and order status from the accounting system automatically. The automation saves the work later, but it costs in the build.
Who may see what. A customer who sees their own documents is the simple case. Several people per customer with different rights, plus staff on your side who look after only some of the customers, make the permission model more involved.
What the portal connects to. Every connection to an existing system is work of its own: accounting, document store, CRM, an order system. How well a system can be connected varies greatly from vendor to vendor.
Whoever leaves these questions open in the quote negotiates them later in the project. That is why, with us, the sketch comes before the quote.
What the AWS bill shows, measured
We run portals in AWS Zurich ourselves, built the same way as the portals we build for customers: login, database and logic without a permanently running server. Here is the bill of the production environment for September 2026, in USD, excluding VAT and credits, from AWS Cost Explorer.
| Item | Portal A, SaaS for business customers | Portal B, management portal with connected devices |
|---|---|---|
| Firewall (WAF) | 14.42 | not in use |
| Key management (KMS) | 1.14 | 4.68 |
| Logs and monitoring (CloudWatch) | 0.67 | 0.74 |
| DNS (Route 53) | 0.55 | 1.04 |
| Database (DynamoDB) | 0.07 | 1.14 |
| Compute (Lambda) | 0.0003 | 0.0053 |
| Login (Cognito) | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| Other items | 0.29 | 1.71 |
| Total | 17.14 | 9.32 |
Compute costs practically nothing. For both portals it was below one Swiss centime a month. Lambda bills per invocation and run time, and a portal that is not under load around the clock generates very little of either.
The bill consists of fixed items. For portal A it is the firewall that catches harmful requests in front of the portal, for portal B the keys the data is encrypted with. These items cost per resource and month, regardless of how many customers log in. The bill therefore grows only slowly with more users.
On top come test and development environments. In September they came to USD 5.60 together for portal A and USD 10.05 for portal B.
What operation pays for
With an AWS bill of USD 9 to 17, the CHF 1’500 a month pays almost entirely for work, namely the work that keeps a portal alive. It arises even when nobody orders anything new.
- Updates. Every runtime has an expiry date. For Node.js 20 on Lambda, AWS stopped security updates on 30 April 2026, and from 30 September 2026 such functions can no longer be updated. Whoever misses that runs a portal they can no longer change when it matters.
- Monitoring and on-call. Someone looks when a login fails or an import from the accounting system gets stuck, and reacts before your customer calls.
- Ongoing improvements. A portal that gets used produces wishes. An additional field, another document type, a notification.
How much of this arises for a portal on its own server or in Kubernetes, and how little in the serverless variant, we counted out across thirteen operational items in Your portal runs on a VPS. The operation price hangs directly on that list.
Ten years in one table
| Over ten years | Amount |
|---|---|
| Portal sketch | CHF 1’600, credited against the build |
| Build | from CHF 12’000 |
| Operation, 120 months | from CHF 180’000 |
| AWS bill including test and development environment, measured | around USD 2’300 to 2’700 |
| Total | from around CHF 192’000, plus the AWS bill |
The build makes up around six percent of the total. When you compare two quotes, the operation line is therefore the more important one. If a quote says nothing about operation, it is incomplete, however low the build price.
For comparison, a position of your own for operation: a DevOps specialist in Switzerland costs around CHF 170’000 a year including employer costs. The figure and how it is derived are in the post on portal operation.
Where the data location sits in the price
AWS Zurich is more expensive than Frankfurt, by around ten percent on average. We worked that out from AWS Pricing API prices in AWS Zurich or Frankfurt. On a bill of USD 9 to 17 a month, ten percent is one to two dollars.
For a portal of this size, data in Switzerland is therefore not a question of price. What the promise covers technically, and what it does not, is in Data in Switzerland.
When a portal does not pay off
A portal pays off when your customers regularly ask for things they could see for themselves: invoices, order status, documents. Each of those emails is answered in two minutes, and together they quickly add up to half a day a week.
If such requests come in a few times a month, a shared folder with a notification or an automatic email is often enough. The sketch then says so, and you have a substantiated answer for one day.
How to get your number
The portal sketch clarifies in one day what your portal has to contain, how your customers log in, what it connects to, what operation costs per month and what the build costs. Two to three hours in the morning with the person who answers the requests today, and the sketch is ready the following working day.
Frequently asked questions
What does a customer portal cost in Switzerland?
With us, from CHF 12’000 for the build and from CHF 1’500 per month for operation, with data in AWS Zurich. Before that, the portal sketch clarifies in one day for CHF 1’600 what your portal has to contain and what exactly it costs. If you have the portal built with us within three months, the amount is credited.
What does running a customer portal on AWS cost per month?
The AWS bill itself is small. For two portals we run in AWS Zurich, it came to USD 9.32 and USD 17.14 for the production environment in September 2026, excluding VAT. Most of it is fixed items, key management and firewall. Compute was below one Swiss centime. What operation costs is the work on it: updates, monitoring and on-call.
What does the build price of a customer portal depend on?
On three questions: which data and documents go in and where they come from, who may see what, and what the portal connects to, for example the accounting system or the document store. Every connection to an existing system and every additional role adds effort. The portal sketch answers these questions before a price is fixed.
Does it cost more if the data stays in Switzerland?
Hardly. AWS Zurich is around ten percent more expensive than Frankfurt. On a bill of USD 9 to 17 a month, that is one to two dollars. Measured against the total cost of a portal, Switzerland as the data location plays no role in the price.
Sources
- Own measurement, AWS Cost Explorer, production environments of two portals in eu-central-2, September 2026, excluding VAT, credits and refunds
- Expiry dates for Node.js 20 on Lambda: AWS documentation on Lambda runtimes, as of August 2026
- Prices: Portal sketch, as of 1 October 2026
- Salary figures and operational items: Your portal runs on a VPS