Engagements - A custom internal platform: admin console, client portal, dashboards
Right now the business runs on a spreadsheet nobody trusts, a Retool screen someone half-built, and you SSHing into prod to fix a customer's record by hand. That works until it doesn't. A build turns the manual, error-prone glue into a real internal platform: an admin console your team can use, a portal your clients log into, and dashboards that show the truth without an export.
- Ops-heavy teams
- B2B startups
- Agencies
What you'll have at launch
The internal system your team runs on — admin console, client portal, and dashboards — replacing the spreadsheets and manual database edits.
- An admin console where your team manages users, accounts, and records without touching the database directly.
- A client-facing portal with its own login, so customers self-serve instead of emailing you for everything.
- Dashboards on your real data — signups, revenue, pipeline, whatever you actually steer by — that load in under a second.
- The manual workflows automated: the CSV imports, the status changes, the emails someone was sending by hand.
How we build it
A build runs 5–8 weeks typical, shipped week by week in increments you review and merge.
Weeks 1–2 · Model & access
We map the entities the business actually revolves around and build the permission model on top: who's an admin, who's a client, who can see and change what. Getting roles and data isolation right up front is what keeps this from becoming the next thing nobody trusts.
Weeks 3–5 · The console & portal
The admin side and the client side get built out in weekly increments — the tables, the detail views, the forms, the actions your team takes fifty times a day. We start with the workflow that hurts most so you're retiring a spreadsheet by week three.
Weeks 6–8 · Automation & dashboards
The manual glue gets automated — imports, exports, scheduled jobs, notification emails — and the dashboards go on top of the clean data. Audit logging goes in so you can always answer who changed what, then we hand it over documented.
What's included
- A role-based admin console: user and account management, record editing, bulk actions, and search that holds up past a few thousand rows.
- A client or partner portal with its own auth, scoped so each customer only ever sees their own data.
- Dashboards and reports on your live data, with the filters and exports your team keeps asking finance for.
- Workflow automation: background jobs, scheduled tasks, CSV import/export, and notification emails that replace the manual steps.
- Audit logging on every sensitive action, so there's a real trail when something looks wrong.
- Integrations into the tools you already run on — Stripe, Slack, your CRM, your warehouse — wired with retries so they don't silently drop.
Stack
- Next.js
- Express
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
How it runs on the subscription
An internal platform is weeks of connected work, not a one-off task, so it runs as a build — the board dedicated to your system, shipping usable pieces every week. Same flat monthly subscription, from $6,900/month, most platforms landing in five to eight weeks. You retire the worst spreadsheet first and reprioritize as the team's real pain shifts; pause between phases whenever.
Frequently asked questions
- How is this different from a no-code tool like Retool or Airtable?
- No-code covers the first 80% fast and then walls you off exactly where your business gets specific — the custom permission, the odd workflow, the integration the platform doesn't support. A build gives you a real app on your own stack with no per-seat tax and no ceiling. If a no-code tool genuinely fits, we'll say so; a build is for when it doesn't.
- Can you build on top of our existing database?
- Usually, yes. If your product data already lives in PostgreSQL or a similar store, we build the admin and portal layer directly on it rather than duplicating anything. Where the data's messy, part of the early work is modelling it cleanly so the tools on top can be trusted.
- We need a client portal specifically. Is that in scope?
- Yes. A client or partner portal — separate login, data scoped per customer, self-serve actions — is one of the most common shapes this build takes. We wire the access controls carefully so no client ever sees another's data, which is the part that's easy to get subtly wrong.
- Who can use it — just admins, or our customers too?
- Both, if you want. The build handles the internal side (your team's admin console) and the external side (a customer-facing portal) with one permission model underneath, so an admin and a client see completely different views of the same system.
- What happens to it after the build?
- It's your code in your repo on your infrastructure. After launch the same subscription flips to task mode for the steady stream of small changes internal tools always generate — a new report, an extra field, another automation — one at a time on your board.
Got a project? Let's ship it.
3 spots open. Subscribe today, hand off the first outcome, and we'll ship it in weekly increments. Smaller tasks still usually land in 48 to 72 hours. No call required.