Case study
A considered home for the work.
Proposals, service agreements, signed contracts, supporting files — a consulting engagement runs on documents. This is a private, secure place for them to live, where clients log in and the consultant keeps control.
- Scope
- Design, build, deploy — a secure client portal for document exchange
- Stack
- Next.js 15 · SQLite · Drizzle ORM · self-hosted
- Audience
- Consulting clients, logged in and hands-on
The problem: documents live in email purgatory
Ask any consultant where the latest signed agreement is and you'll get a forwarded thread, an attachment they're pretty sure is the right version, and a search through three inboxes. The client has the same problem from the other side — they can't find what was sent when, or whether they're looking at the current draft or the one that's been superseded.
The Client Platform gives every engagement a single home. The consultant uploads and organizes; the client logs in to view and download — and, when the engagement calls for it, to upload their own files back. Nothing disappears into a thread.
The interesting part: who can see what
A document portal that's just a shared folder is a portal that leaks. Every file here carries a visible to client flag, so the consultant can keep working notes private while sharing only what's ready. Documents are versioned — upload a new draft and the old one is marked superseded, not deleted, so there's always a trail.
It's a two-way exchange, not a read-only drop box. Clients can upload their own supporting files, and either side gets an email when something new appears. But the guardrails stay in place: clients can only add supporting material, never restructure the engagement, and every change writes to an activity log so the consultant can see exactly what happened and when.
The Client Platform is live at clients.applauseconsulting.com — self-hosted, so the documents never touch a third party's server, and backed up on a schedule that respects what they are.
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