Your customers email you for things they could see for themselves

How you know you have outgrown the email phase

The same questions arrive every week. Where is my last invoice. How far along is my order. Can you send me that document again. Did you receive my paperwork. Each one takes two minutes to answer, and together they cost someone on your team half a day a week.

The customer notices too. They are waiting for an answer they could fetch themselves, if there were a place to fetch it from. A customer portal is that place: documents, status, invoices and history behind a login, attached to the site you already have.

Why a sketch and not a quote

Nobody buys a portal from CHF 12’000 on a phone call, and we do not quote one on a phone call. The price hangs on three questions: which data goes in and where it comes from, who is allowed to see what, and what the portal connects to, such as your accounting or your document storage. Leave those open in the quote and you negotiate them later, inside the project.

The sketch answers them first, in one day, at a fixed price. Afterwards you know what the portal contains, what it costs to build and to run, and whether it is worth it.

How the day runs

Morning, at your office or remote. Two to three hours with the person who answers customer requests today. We go through the requests of the last few weeks and sort them: what belongs in the portal, what stays a conversation, what an automatic email can handle. Plus the systems where the data sits today.

Afternoon, at ours. We draw the portal: data model, login and roles, connections to your existing systems, and we cost the operation per month. The operating figures come from our own portals, which have been in production for months, and from no estimate.

On the next working day the sketch is on your desk. A document both sides can read: management finds cost, benefit and timeline, your technical contact finds architecture and data location.

What the sketch contains

• Which requests the portal answers and which it does not, with the list from the morning.
• The data model: which documents and data go in, where they come from, how they stay current.
• Login and roles: how your customers sign in, who on your side maintains content, who sees what.
• The connections: which existing systems feed the portal and how.
• The operating cost per month, derived from running systems, with data location and the providers involved.
• A fixed-price offer for the build, with timeline and stages.

If the morning shows that a portal is too much for you, the sketch says so. A shared folder with notifications achieves the same in some cases, and then we write that instead of selling you something.

What comes next

Build with us. The portal is built serverless in AWS Zurich, from CHF 12’000, operation from CHF 1’500 per month. The CHF 1’600 for the sketch is credited.

Build elsewhere or in-house. The sketch is yours. It is written so that another partner can work from it.

No build. Then one day bought you a documented answer to whether a portal is worth it, plus the list of requests that can be automated even without one.

Why work with us

• We run two portals ourselves: SCMC.ch, a Swiss cybersecurity SaaS in production in AWS Zurich since November 2025, and Quartiero, our own product for property managers, live since July 2026. The operating figures in your sketch come from there.
• You work directly with the senior architect who draws the sketch and later builds the portal. No account manager passing you to a junior.
• The sketch is separate from the build and belongs to you. We have no interest in drawing a portal bigger than you need.
• We are based in Bern, your data sits in AWS Zurich. Fluent German and English.

What it costs

CHF 1’600 fixed for the day and the sketch. If you commission the build with us within three months, the amount is credited in full. The price is set up front, so you never have to negotiate scope in the middle of the conversation.