Why Pay €49/Month for a Client Portal?

You went looking for a client portal and a lot of options land around €49 a month. That is enough to be worth a moment's thought, not enough to need a business case. The useful question is not whether €49 is too much. It is what €49 should buy, because at that price two different kinds of product compete for the same money.

Quick answer

• At around €49 a month you are choosing between an all-in-one suite and a portal plan with real capacity. They cost the same and do different jobs.
• A suite bundles CRM, project management, invoicing and contracts around the portal, and you pay for all of it whether you use it or not.
• A focused portal at that price should spend the money on capacity: storage, large files, team seats and a countersigned DPA.
• Working alone with modest volumes? An entry plan is usually enough. Add colleagues or clients who ask for a signed processing agreement, and the higher tier starts to make sense.

The two things €49 buys

Option one is the suite. Open the feature list and you find a CRM with contacts and pipeline stages, a project manager with tasks and boards, invoicing, proposals and contract signing, all wrapped around the file-sharing part you came for. That is a real product for a real buyer. But the price is set by the whole bundle. The portal is the doorway; the CRM and the project manager are the house.

Option two is capacity. A focused portal does a short list well (a private space per client, files out, documents back, comments and status on each file) and spends your €49 on doing that list at scale: more storage, bigger files, seats for colleagues, and the paperwork that careful clients ask for.

Neither is wrong. They answer different questions.

The question that sets your price

One question decides which side you are on: will you run your business inside this tool?

If you will manage your sales pipeline, send every invoice and track every project there, the suite earns its price, because you are putting several tools on one bill. Tools like HoneyBook and Assembly (formerly Copilot) are built for that buyer. Check their current plans and prices on their own sites; this article does not assume they cost €49 or include the same features.

If you already have a CRM, invoice through your accountant or manage projects somewhere else, or you do not need any of that, most of a suite subscription buys features you will never open. You are renting a house to use one room.

What Droplana's €49 plan is for

Droplana is the focused option: a client document portal where each client gets a private portal for the files you send, the documents they return and the comments on each file. Its Practice plan sits at the €49 mark. Here is what the plans include:

The step from Solo to Practice buys four things:

• Team seats. Practice has five seats in total: the owner and four colleagues. Solo is a single seat, so adding a colleague means moving up. Clients never use a seat.
• Storage and file size. 250 GB and files up to 2 GB, instead of Solo's 50 GB and 1 GB.
• A countersigned DPA. A DPA is available on every plan; Practice and Studio add a copy we countersign, which some clients' data protection officers ask for. Having one does not by itself make your processing compliant.
• Priority support, which matters more once the portal is the channel your clients use.

Checklists, per-file comments and in-browser PDF signing are on every plan, and so are the MCP server for AI assistants and automation tools and outgoing webhooks. Practice adds capacity, not features you are locked out of. What no plan includes is a CRM, an invoicing engine or a project board. See pricing for the full table and the FAQ for limits, storage and security.

The arithmetic, without a savings promise

With five business users, €49 ÷ 5 = €9.80 per person per month before tax. The account is still billed €49; leaving seats unused does not lower it. With three users, the same bill is about €16.33 each.

Annual billing is €490 plus tax for the year, against 12 × €49 = €588 at the monthly price, a difference of €98 before tax. For an owner moving from Solo, the monthly difference is €49 - €19 = €30 before tax. Compare that with the seats and capacity you need, not with an invented estimate of hours saved.

If you only need more room, a storage add-on on a paid plan costs €15/month or €150/year plus tax, adds 500 GB and raises the file limit to 5 GB. It does not add seats.

Two illustrative buyers

A consultant working alone. She tracks leads in a spreadsheet and invoices through her bookkeeper, and she is happy with both. What she lacks is a clean place to send deliverables and collect signed forms back. A suite would solve that and hand her a CRM and an invoicing tool she will not use. She also does not need five seats or 250 GB. Solo covers her, and she should not pay €49 to prove a point.

A three-person accounting practice. The same portal need, a different shape. All three need access to client files, they are collecting tax documents under a confidentiality duty, and some clients ask for a signed processing agreement. Practice covers the three of them with two seats spare, and the countersigned DPA answers that request. They should still check their largest file and total storage before choosing.

In both cases the deciding factor was not the price. It was honesty about which features get opened on a Tuesday.

How to decide without overpaying

1. List the jobs you need done. Sharing files and collecting documents, or also CRM, invoicing and project tracking?
2. Cross off what you already have. If your CRM, invoicing and project tools work, a suite duplicates them.
3. Count the seats. Count business users separately from clients. Two or more people usually decides the tier on its own.
4. Check what your clients' paperwork requires. A countersigned DPA sits on the higher tier.
5. Start lower than you think. You can move up once seats or storage are the limit. If you are still on email, when to upgrade from email to a portal helps you time the switch, and what a client portal is explains the category.

Questions before you start

Pay €49 for a suite only if you will use the CRM and project manager inside it, and for a focused portal when you need the seats, storage and paperwork. Start a client portal for free and move up when the work asks for it.