I started complining to Portal about their issues and bugs well before they instituted their new payment system and I would be happy to show you the emails.

The $50 a month payment was just icing on the cake.

You were complaining about a free product that you weren't forced to use?

It's like people complaining about ads on Facebook or Instagram. How dare a company that revolutionizes something attempt to make a profit!

I don't claim to know any of your ages, but this feel like you are owed something for nothing is a new thing in the last 5-10 years.

I can assume your client pay you for inferior work?  Its not that hard to understand the concept of value and trying to see what has the best value.  Paying isn't the issue, but you still can't seem to understand that.  Paying for the best product for you does matter.  Free means you just ride with the waves and make do with what is provided.  Once you have to pay, its best to test out the waters to see what works best.  At present, I am not sure which platform I will land on, but I sure as hell am going to test to see what works best.

You make zero sense. If you want to get really technical time is money. Using our time to use a buggy product costs us money. Their model (before the monthly fee) relies on dealers placing orders. In wich case they make money on that. Clearly it wasn’t working out well enough so they stuck it to us.

They had their new website in beta for months, even held off on releasing it because it was so bad...they got feedback, fixed some things and not others. Therefor forcing us to buy a product that now does NOT work. Their pricing model to now get it free doesn’t work for a lot of dealers because we cannot stagger jobs when they are ongoing.

Charging dealers and their options to get it free doesn’t work for a lot of us....they don’t even seem to be listening anymore. Either they are in full panic mode or just as the email implies they don’t really care.

Again, it’s not about the $50 it’s the coin for a product that is seriously broken right now. Especially when this email was dumped a week after a forced update.....

If you do nothing but 1-2 day jobs then portal works for you (when the site is working) a lot of us have projects that force us to purchase things in stages. Please don’t think this is about money, it’s about the fact it’s seriously broken and they want to charge for it.

We have been one of the "leeches", only using Portal to create proposals. Sorry we ruined it for some of you. You are welcome. Bwahahaha!

I still cannot find the post with a link to an alternative platform that does everything Portal does, or better, that is free. Can someone point me to it?

Apparently we have a different definition of logic.

Since time is money, I think you owe yourself money for time spent on this thread.

If you arent able to submit an average of 5k per month (15k spread over 3 months/ 60k per year) then I am sorry but you are correct that you arent their target business anyways.

Personally, even with this "buggy" product (As you see it), it is still a far better solution than anything anyone else has put forward.

For us it is actually not only a great software platform but a way I am able to leverage an additional percentage on my orders on top of the 2-3 percent I get on my CC orders and the cash back from vendors we are getting another 1 percent from Portal. Thats up to 5 percent on almost every transaction.


So...obviously you dont like the software for some reason (clearly not the $50) and I am not going to change your mind. But for one of us it is a game changing product that has grown my business, freed up my personal time, and actually pays us to use it and for another its a burdensome piece of software you would rather not have especially for the price. Perception....I guess.

Good luck. Keep us in the loop how that goes.

So far Jetbuilt is pretty nice. They require you to add price sheets to open up your product in the database. It's very fast to add product manually also. The finished proposal looks nicer than portal imho. It may have to do with having the ability to customize it. I did have an issue with the site freezing when trying to change text color to a custom color. I contacted them and they said it's a known issue being worked on.

Portal is still faster due to their database. I'm going to use Jetbuilt for the remainder ofy trial period to see I prefer and want to move forward with. Both are pretty easy and overall pretty quick to create. One thing I just remembered I want to ask Jetbuilt about is adding product to multiple rooms at the same time. I didn't see a way and I had to add the same sku to 4 different rooms one at a time which slowed things down.

You are completely missing the point. I would be happy to pay the $50 per month for Portal -- the old Portal that worked. The new version is broken in numerous ways.

This is not a $$$ issue for me, it's a product issue. The convoluted monthly paid system was timed very badly. Revert back to the original Portal and for me, no problem, I'll pay the monthly fee.

It's looking like the payment system they were using before was not working and they have become desperate. Why else would a company retroactively make you pay a fee? That was certainly bad PR as well. They didn't think this through properly.

I'm one of the proposal only users. I may start using the orders feature for a vendor or 2, but really, it's easier for me, personally, to do all my orders directly on the vendor's sites in most cases. I don't mind paying for the service, that's only fair and reasonable. But, like many have already said, forcing a rollout with as many known issues as this one is just complete BS. Have we become so accustomed to manufacturers and software developers rolling out barely working garbage that we're now OK with it? Because that's what some of you are saying. "Hey, you had a great product that delivered as promised, but please, please take my money for this utterly inferior, barely functional, new version because low expectations are what I'm all about." Yeah, not cool. I'm hoping they quickly resolve all the problems. I don't want to migrate to something else, and I like Portal, but damn guys, at least have the website mostly right, with only one or two minor glitches before you roll it out and force everyone to just deal with it.

No, I get it. It's not about the money. You'd gladly pay. You just keep mentioning the fee and how it was poorly timed. But it's not about the money. Got it.

I'm sorry you are having issues. I use it extensively and am not having issues. Their new site is a response to issues others requested, like mobile device responsiveness. It is working well for me.

I guess to sum up my view is that I like to put myself in other business owners shoes. When I break my neck for my clients, I appreciate when it's acknowledged. Especially when in creating something unique and attempting to be responsive to their needs as best as I can. Its frustrating when clients (you in this case) don't understand the details involved in creating this change and allowing time for perfection. Even worse when ones requests compete with another's and the company can't win. I feel for these guys because I too had dealt with unappreciative clients. I'm just shocked at the amount of critique from people that should know better of a company doing their best to meet a long term need in the industry.

Let's try this again because I don't think you get it.

The fee bothers me on a *principal level*. Nothing more. I am anything but cheap and I know that in most cases you get what you pay for. But this no longer holds true for Portal. I have paid for proposal software in the past and I will again in the future. Good software is almost never free.

So I will say it again. I would be *happy* to pay if the following items were fixed:

1. Labor formatting is screwed up on my printed proposals
2. Product Photos are way too small
3. Font size is now much smaller and more difficult to read

The problem is that I don't believe that items 2 and 3 will ever be fixed. That is concerning because living in FL, I have an older clientele and they have been having difficulty with the new proposals. One of the Portal tech support folks told me there were technical issues with making the photos and fonts bigger. When I asked Josh about it he was very non-committal about getting it fixed. All he said was that they would work on consistency between the web and printed versions.

Before these issues I was a huge fan of Portal. I constantly told them how much I liked their system and I told numerous other installers to try them out.

The Portal problems are like a favorite restaurant getting new management and/or a new chef and then raising prices. Suddenly the service and food is no longer as good and you have to pay more. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't go back and I would find another restaurant. So that's why I will be looking at Jetbuilt.

well said Dawn....

To be honest im a little shocked at how quiet portal has been. Either they stuck their head in the sand or they are just letting this thread go and hope to have a much better PR response...

I REALLY like portal and the guys/tech support are fantastic. What is weird is the silence, not even an email blast update on whats going on...Even an update with "Hey guys were listening and understand" would be great. What would be EVEN BETTER is remove the pay option so we can get back to using the site and offering feedback. Im now locked out because I hit the 4 (1 of them were a glitch so counted twice against my proposals)

ALL WERE ASKING FOR IS A RELATIVELY WORKING WEBSITE BEFORE WE HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!

this being said, unfortunate for Portal, but great for Jetbuilt is all the publicity they are getting. I actually had no idea they existed until this thread. There are quite a few guys that are sending me and other the proposals they are building and they look fantastic. I understand its seldom glitchy but not nearly the level of Portals current website...

I have two proposals I need to revise from a few months ago, I cant without paying now which is infuriating, again, yet another thing that wasn't very well thought out when dumping this payment structure on us..

Brendon, you went from having valid complaints to now being over the top. You have two quotes that could make you thousands and thousands of dollars, yet you’re too cheap to pony up $50 to a company that has probably made you bundles. Maybe you will pay $50 this month, and $50 next month, and that will be it. But it is time to pay up and stop whining if you want to use their service.