Client Portal - Invoicing/Payments, Contracts, etc.

I've owned a medium-sized agency for thirty years and I'm looking for a Client Portal + Billing solution. For reference, we're a high-touch full-service agency and keep our client load around 80 clients and our staff around fifteen people.

The ideal software would have the following features in order of importance.

Note: Many popular options would be outrageously expensive for us due to our billing volume so please see the notes further down before recommending your favorite service as I'll call them out by name and give the reasons they're unattractive.

  • Client Portal - a place the client can login and see their invoices, read messages, announcements, interact with support tickets, sign contracts, see important files, etc.
  • Invoicing and client billing via CC and ACH.
    • Direct integration with CC services like Stripe and ACH services without add-on fees (see notes further down)
  • Pricing that makes sense. $50/user/month makes sense if we're only using it for billing as that's a couple of people but if you add in features like support tickets, task management, and the like -- now you're talking about a price of over $750/month due to the size of our team.
  • Integration with Google Drive, DropBox, etc. so that you're storing important documents away from the portal in case someday you switch software.
  • Custom fields so that you can provide handy links for the client.
  • Contract digital signing.
  • Ticketing for support.
  • Light task management or the ability to integrate something like Trello.
  • Time tracking that gets added to tasks.

So here's the big problem -- price and this comes in two flavors.

  1. As I mentioned, paying $50/month for a couple of people is no big deal but if you need 15 people in there to handle support, be able to add time tracking, see invoices, find the client's phone number, etc., $50/user/month is stupid expensive. While you may not think so, you have to realize we're paying $15/user/month for ten other platforms at least so it adds up quickly.
  2. CC & ACH fees. Due to our large volume, we have an incredible rate with Stripe and pay only $0.50/ACH transaction with another provider. See Copilot below and you'll understand.

Problematic Programs

  • Copilot (Professional): $69/user/month would be $1,035/month and we'd pay an additional $1,400/month in credit card fees as they fix your merchant fee rate and don't give you a direct connection to Stripe.
  • HoneyBook, Dubsado, and Bonsai all suffer from the same issue.

I'd rather find an off-the-shelf service than reinvent the wheel as doing so I might as well start another business and compete with the above. Again, I'd rather not do that but at over $2,000/month -- nothing makes sense that I've found so far.

Ideas and suggestions?