Notes for the person deciding whether to build something, and what to build first. Budgets, timelines, the trade-offs nobody mentions until the invoice arrives. Nothing here is written for other developers: if a piece cannot help you decide something or ask a better question, it does not get published.
2 articles so far, in four groups: what an internal tool costs and how it is scoped, what changes when the product lives on a phone, how automated tests earn their keep, and what it takes to release and keep something alive. New ones arrive every few days — the schedule is set, so the queue does not depend on anybody remembering.
Access rules are the part of a client portal that breaks silently and looks normal from the inside. Here is what to specify before anyone writes code.
It is not the number of screens. It is the number of systems the portal has to read from, and whether any of them can be trusted to answer on time.
Reading rather than deciding? The case studies are the same arguments applied to two real products, with the prices, the timelines and a demo you can open on sample data.