B2B client portal for a vertical SaaS

Context

A legal-tech vertical SaaS (contract management and due diligence for law firms) with 280 client organizations at the time of the project. Before, onboarding, support, billing and API access ran through email and a shared Notion.

Support tickets grew in line with the number of clients, and onboarding a new client took on average 1.5 working days of a Customer Success person.

Challenges

Manual onboarding: every new client needed an account created by hand, a custom demo, branding setup, an API key and 3 training sessions
Repetitive tickets: 65% of support volume was about 8 recurring questions with no central documentation
Opaque billing: invoices sent monthly by email, with no way for the client to see current usage
Uncontrolled API access: keys shared over email, no per-client rate limiting, no audit trail
Falling retention: clients with low usage were not spotted in time to step in

Approach

We built a full self-service portal integrated with the existing product.

Account module

Self-signup with email validation + an onboarding wizard
Branding setup (logo, colors, optional custom domain)
User invitations with roles (admin, manager, contributor, viewer)
Audit log per organization

Billing module

Real-time usage (active contracts, users, storage)
Invoice history with PDF download + e-Invoice XML
Self-service plan change (upgrade/downgrade)
Automatic retry on failed payments, with notices at 3, 7 and 14 days

API module

API key creation and revocation per organization
Rate limiting set per plan
Interactive documentation (OpenAPI 3 + try-it-now)
Webhook configurator with a test endpoint

Support module

Knowledge base with full-text search (300+ initial articles)
Ticketing connected to the support team's internal Slack channel
Public status page with incident history
Automatic escalation by the plan's SLA

Health monitoring per account

Automatic usage score per organization
Alert to Customer Success when the score drops below a threshold
Internal dashboard with the top 50 accounts at risk

Results

Support tickets per month: down 60% within 90 days of launching the knowledge base and the self-service flows
Time to onboard a new client: from 1.5 working days to 4 hours (30 minutes of it human input)
NPS after launch: 58, compared with 31 before
6-month retention: 94%, up from 86%
Customer Success capacity: the same headcount supports 2.4x more clients

Tech stack

Backend: Python + FastAPI + PostgreSQL
Frontend: Next.js + Tailwind + shadcn/ui
Auth: Auth0 with custom RBAC mapping
Billing: Stripe Billing + ANAF e-Invoicing adapter
Documentation: Docusaurus with internal contributors
Status page: BetterStack
Hosting: Vercel (frontend) + AWS RDS (DB)

Status

In production for 11 months. Next steps: multi-region expansion (DACH) with GDPR data residency and enterprise SSO (SAML 2.0).

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