Company / Developer: Portage Bay Solutions — a software development consultancy that builds and supports FileMaker applications and the web infrastructure around them for clients across many industries. Web application development is led in-house by Jacob Carr, Lead Developer, Web Apps. Portage Bay has been an early adopter of Klai (formerly FM BetterForms) for roughly five years.
Portage Bay Solutions makes its living building software for other companies, most of them on a Claris FileMaker backend. For years, the firm kept meeting a particular kind of request: clients who wanted a modern, highly customized web experience that went beyond what FileMaker’s WebDirect was designed to deliver. Portage Bay needed a way to build that kind of experience on top of its clients’ existing FileMaker systems — without the cost and disruption of a full stack rebuild. Klai became that option, and over five years it has broadened the range of web work the firm can confidently take on.
As a FileMaker-first consultancy, Portage Bay Solutions chooses the right delivery route for each project. For the subset of engagements that called for a highly customized, design-led web interface, the established options each carried trade-offs: WebDirect, which is well suited to many web needs but more constrained for that kind of bespoke design control, or a full stack rebuild, which was too heavy and expensive to fit most engagements. The practical consequence was that some ambitious web requests were harder to deliver, or were pushed toward a heavier full-stack route than the project really warranted. Klai’s FileMaker-native architecture changed the equation. By connecting directly to the existing FileMaker backend rather than replacing it, Klai let Portage Bay build modern, customized web applications — from data-gathering forms to scheduling systems to full client-onboarding flows with payment handling — on top of business logic the clients already trusted.
Portage Bay Solutions is a software development consultancy headquartered in Washington State, operating with a fully remote team. The firm builds custom FileMaker applications and the supporting web infrastructure for a broad client base, and supports those applications over time. The large majority of its work is FileMaker-based, while also providing scalable custom web applications. As a consultancy, Portage Bay’s success depends on both winning client work and keeping clients satisfied as their needs grow — which makes the quality of the web layer it can deliver a direct commercial concern. The firm was among the early adopters of the platform when it was still called FM BetterForms, and has now worked in it for around five years. Jacob Carr leads web application development and is the firm’s primary contact for the platform.
• Deliver modern, well-designed web interfaces on top of clients’ existing FileMaker systems • Avoid the cost and disruption of full stack rebuilds wherever possible • Take on web feature requests the firm previously had to decline • Offer a highly customized, browser-first web option for the projects that call for one
The challenge centered on design-led web work. FileMaker’s native approach to the web, through WebDirect, is deliberately streamlined and serves many use cases well, but for the highly customized, browser-first experiences some clients wanted, Portage Bay had no realistic way to deliver that level of design control without building a full stack from scratch. As Jacob put it, for those projects the web layer the firm could offer “never quite matched what our clients had envisioned.”