Custom portal build economics — $20K-60K initial, 3-12 months, 15-20%/year maintenance (~$3K-10K+/yr) for patches/auth/updates

Claim: Custom client portal: $20,000-$60,000 initial, 3-12 months, maintenance 15-20% of build/year (~$3,000-$10,000+/yr) for security patching, auth management, updates.

WordPress / plugin route: membership plugin $199-$399/yr (MemberPress, WooCommerce Memberships) + ~$1,000-$4,000/yr developer maintenance.

Source: spp.co/blog/true-cost ; agencyhandy.com/client-portal/client-portal-pricing ; spaceotechnologies.com/blog/web-portal-development-cost ; milesit.com/web-portal-pricing

Confidence: Industry-consensus — multiple developer sources converge.

Caveat: Both portal-SaaS vendors (motivated to make custom look expensive) and dev shops (motivated to quote high) appear in the source list. The convergence on $20-60K + ongoing maintenance is credible.

Why this matters for Candid: Over 5 years, custom routinely exceeds the bought cost — by an order of magnitude or more vs SuiteDash. The bar for custom is correspondingly high — see R1 — Default to BUY, not build, for client portals; recommend a horizontal platform ($19-79/mo) or the bundled vertical-SaaS portal and the five-narrow-cases list in Five narrow cases where a custom portal is justified: unmodeled workflow / proprietary integration / portal-is-the-product / data-residency / scale-inversion.