The client portal for independent technology and digital consultants.
Make scope visible so change orders stop being awkward, show progress on work your client can’t evaluate directly, and bill each phase without chasing it.
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Generic client tools don’t know what you actually deliver.
Scope creep arrives as a favour, not a request
“While you’re in there, could you also…” is how a fixed-bid engagement quietly loses its margin. The problem is rarely that the client is acting in bad faith — it is that there was no visible boundary to cross. When the original scope is a PDF someone signed in March, nobody is looking at it in June.
Your client cannot evaluate the work directly
A migration, an integration, a refactor — the client cannot read the diff. They judge the engagement almost entirely on how well informed they feel, which means a technically excellent project with poor visibility loses to a mediocre one with good reporting. That is frustrating, and it is also fixable.
Phased work bills badly out of a generic invoice tool
Discovery, build, migration, hypercare — each phase has its own value and its own payment trigger, but most invoicing tools treat the engagement as one flat thing. So you either invoice manually at each gate, or you bill monthly and lose the link between the money and the milestone it paid for.
The handover is where reputations are made
Documentation, credentials, runbooks, the record of what was decided and why. If that lives across Slack threads, email attachments, and a Drive folder nobody has permissions to, the last impression of an otherwise good engagement is a scramble.
How technology and digital consultants use ConsultBase.
How does a technology consultant use ConsultBase?
You create an engagement per project and give it milestones matching your real phases — discovery complete, architecture approved, staging deployed, production cutover, hypercare ended. Deliverables sit under those milestones for the client to review and approve, which puts a dated record against every sign-off. The client sees the whole thing in a portal branded to your practice, so “where are we” is answered before it is asked.
How does this help with scope creep and change orders?
Scope stops being a document nobody reopens. The engagement shows exactly which deliverables were agreed, so a new request is visibly a new request rather than an ambiguous extension of an old one. You can send it as a fresh proposal — which the client signs online, and which creates its own engagement with milestones on acceptance — so the conversation becomes routine paperwork instead of an awkward negotiation about whether something was “included.”
What does the client see when they cannot read the code?
Phase, milestones completed, deliverables awaiting their review, and what you are blocked on from their side. That last one matters more than consultants expect: half of perceived delay on technical projects is actually the client sitting on a decision, and a portal that shows it plainly changes the conversation without you having to raise it.
Can I bill by phase rather than one lump sum?
Yes. An accepted proposal converts to an invoice in one click, and you can invoice per milestone as each phase closes. For ongoing retainers — hypercare, fractional CTO time, a monthly support block — set up a recurring invoice once with your own amount, frequency, terms, and tax rate, and it generates and sends on schedule with a payment link. Payments go through your own Stripe account at Stripe’s standard rates.
What about time-and-materials work?
Log time against an engagement as you work, then convert those entries into an invoice with the line items pre-filled rather than reconstructing the month from memory. If you bill a blended rate across different kinds of work, the free rate calculator will work out the number and hand it straight into a new SOW.
Does the handover get any easier?
Documents shared through the engagement stay attached to it with dates and approval history, so the record assembles itself rather than being compiled at the end. You can share files into the client portal, or send expiring download links to people who never had portal access. Everything is exportable — nothing you produce is locked behind a subscription to read later.
Questions technology and digital consultants ask.
Does ConsultBase integrate with GitHub, Jira, or Linear?
No. There is no repository, issue-tracker, or CI integration, and no public API to build one against. ConsultBase manages the client-facing half of an engagement — scope, deliverables, approvals, documents, and billing — while your delivery tooling stays where it is. In practice most technology consultants want those separate anyway, because the client should not be reading your issue tracker.
Is this a project management tool?
Not really, and it is worth being clear about it. There is no sprint board, no dependency graph, no resource levelling. It manages the relationship rather than the delivery — the portal your client logs into, the deliverables they approve, the proposals and invoices. If you need a full PM tool for internal execution, keep it and use ConsultBase for the client-facing layer.
Can I bring subcontractors into an engagement?
Pro includes up to three team members and Firm up to five, with owner, admin and member roles governing who can invite, remove, change branding, and manage bookings. It is a straightforward role system, not a per-engagement permission matrix — so a subcontractor on your account can see the workspace, not just one project. Worth knowing before you add someone you only want scoped to a single client.
Do my clients need to install or learn anything?
No. They get an email invite and sign in with a link — no password to create, nothing to remember between logins. That matters when your client contact is a busy operations lead who will visit the portal twice a month at most.
What does it cost, and is my client count capped?
Every paid plan includes unlimited clients — plans differ on team size, AI access, and white-labelling, not on how many clients you serve. Firm removes the “Powered by ConsultBase” mark from every client-facing surface. There is a 14-day free trial and no credit card is required to start.
Independent technology consultants lose money in two predictable places: scope that expanded without anyone deciding it should, and clients who felt uninformed on projects that were actually going fine. Both are visibility problems wearing different clothes.
ConsultBase was built for advisory practices rather than creative freelancing, which shows up in small but constant ways — engagements rather than projects, deliverables the client formally approves rather than tasks someone ticks off, retainers rather than subscriptions. For technical work that alignment matters, because your client is buying a decision they cannot verify and your job is to make the process legible.
It will not manage your sprints and it does not want to. It handles the half of the engagement your client actually sees, and makes a one-person practice read like a firm while doing it.
Built for the way you work.
Unlimited clients on every plan, a branded portal your clients actually log into, and Ivy — a 50+ tool AI associate that knows your engagements.
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