i've taken over a few custom internal portals for growing businesses, and the story is almost always the same. founders start with off-the-shelf saas and no-code tools, which is fine on day one. then volume picks up, webhooks fail and nobody notices, client data ends up in five places, and someone on the team is copy-pasting between apps half the day.
the usual fix is hiring a dev shop to build one custom portal. but then you hit the hourly billing problem. when the agency gets paid by the hour, there's not much reason to move fast, so a lot of founders end up in a 6 month build with scope creep, just to get back what zapier was already doing.
so if you've made the jump from duct tape to a custom internal portal: