You're on a ladder. Your phone buzzes. It's the homeowner: "Hey, did you send that estimate yet? And when does the countertop come in? And can you remind me what we agreed on for the backsplash?"
You now have a choice: climb down and spend 20 minutes texting back-and-forth, or ignore it and listen to the voicemail they leave three minutes later.
Neither one is running a business. Both happen because there's no single place for your customer to just look.
The $29 Tool Built for One Person — Not a Crew of 12
Big CRMs — the ones with the crew scheduling and multi-foreman dispatch and all the rest — love to charge a lot for features you'll never touch. Client-facing portals are often the thing they gatekeep behind their higher tiers, because they know it's valuable.
Here's the thing: valuable for a solo GC doesn't have to cost what they charge. Chisel is $29/mo flat. No tiers. No per-user fees. Everything included. It's cheap because it's not bloated, and it's not bloated because it's built for one person.
That includes the customer portal.
What a Customer Portal Actually Does For You
When you send an estimate through Chisel, your customer gets a single link. That link is their window into the whole job — and it doesn't change from project kickoff to final payment.
Here's what lives there:
Their estimate. They can review it line by line and approve it with a signature, without you being on-site or on the phone. The approval is timestamped. You get a notification. Done.
Change orders, as they happen. You know how it goes — they see the open wall and suddenly want to move an outlet, add a can light, swap the door swing. You write it up in Chisel, they get a notification, they tap to approve. Both of you have a record. Nobody's eating $600 because of a misremembered conversation at the end of the job.
The invoice. When the job is done, you send the invoice and they pay it through the same portal via Stripe — card or bank transfer. They already know where to go. No "I didn't get the invoice email" back-and-forth.
The Real Problem It Solves: The 'Where Are We At?' Tax
Every solo GC pays a hidden tax that doesn't show up in any expense report. Call it the where are we at tax — the hourly cost of fielding status questions, re-sending documents, explaining what you agreed to, and talking a customer off the ledge because they can't remember if the backsplash was included.
It's not their fault. They don't live in your job like you do. They saw a quote three weeks ago and now they're anxious. If they had somewhere to look, they wouldn't text. But they don't, so they do.
A customer portal doesn't just save you time on the back-and-forth. It makes you look more professional than the guy who's texting PDFs from his personal number. That's the kind of thing that gets you a 5-star review and a referral to their neighbor.
Less Features You Don't Want. Everything You Do.
You don't need crew scheduling. You don't need multi-foreman dispatch. You don't need a CRM designed for a company with a sales team and an operations manager.
You need to send a tight estimate, get it approved, handle the surprises that come up mid-job without a fight, and get paid when you're done.
Chisel is $29/mo and built to do exactly that — including a customer portal that would cost you significantly more in the tools built for 10-person crews.
Start your 14-day free trial and send your first customer portal link before the week's out.
