Softr review

Softr is a tool for building customer portals and other small web apps for a business. Its AI builds a first version from your description. You change it in an editor, and Softr hosts it. If you are thinking about it for your business, you probably want to know whether each customer sees only their own data, and what it costs.

To find out, I built a customer portal for a made-up cleaning company called Wrenfield Cleaning. I described it to Softr's AI and let it build the first version. Then I logged in as different sample customers to see what each of them could see. I fixed the problems and added a public home page with a form for quote requests. Finally I published the portal and invited a test customer. I tested Softr on November 2, 2026, and checked the prices the same day.

The AI built a working portal in under two and a half minutes. It also made mistakes that matter in a portal. Every customer saw the company's totals, and customers could mark their own invoices as paid. The worst problem showed up when I logged in as a customer. I could open other customers' bookings, with their addresses and notes on where the keys are. I fixed all of it, but you need to know where to look.

The short answer

Softr suits you if you want a login area where each customer sees their own bookings or invoices. Plan time for setting up who can see what, and test it as a customer before you invite real ones.

Look elsewhere if you want to sell products online. For a business website without a login area, I would also pick a regular website builder. Softr's public page was slow on phones, and visitors on phones saw no header with the company name.

Selling and bookings: Softr has no shop. Payments run through your own Stripe account, which I did not test. Bookings are requests through a form, and your staff confirm them on a board. There is no calendar with free time slots.

Price: the free plan allows 5 app users, so it only works for a test or a very small portal. Basic allows 5 customers plus 5 people from your own team. Pro is the first plan with 50 customer logins and separate groups for staff and customers. It costs $99 a month on yearly billing or $119 on monthly billing, plus tax.

Not tested: payments, because they need a Stripe account. I also did not see what happens to the app when the free trial ends. Softr did not pay for this review, and there are no affiliate links.

What I liked:

• Before it built anything, the AI asked good questions. One was whether customers book directly or your staff confirm each booking.
• The first version already had pages for customers and staff, with sample data in Softr's own database.
• You can look at the app as any of your users. That is how I found the problems.
• Changing pages by hand was easy. Each block has its settings in a side panel.
• Inviting a customer worked well. The invitation and the login code arrived within seconds.
• The AI is cheap to use. The build and two fix requests used 1.19 of my 55 free AI credits.

What bothered me:

• The AI's portal showed every customer the company's totals. It also let customers mark their own invoices as paid.
• As a logged-in customer, I could open other customers' bookings, with their addresses and notes about their keys. Below the Business plan, you fix this with a filter on every block that shows customer data.
• The AI's first answer to my fix request was its internal plan, and nothing changed.
• The public page scored 30 out of 100 for speed on a simulated phone.
• On phones, the Softr badge covered half of the "Book a cleaning" button.
• The emails from my workflow never arrived, although Softr said both runs had worked.

The portal I built

Wrenfield Cleaning is a made-up company that cleans homes and offices. Its public home page shows the services with their prices. A form at the bottom lets visitors ask for a quote.

Customers log in to see their cleanings and invoices. They can book a cleaning and leave a note for the cleaner, for example where the key is. Staff see all bookings on a board and in a calendar.

The data lives in Softr's own database. Softr can also work with data from Airtable or Google Sheets, but I did not try that. The sample data came from the AI.

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Open the Wrenfield Cleaning site. It is a demo, so please do not send personal information through its form.

Signing up and the AI's questions

Softr's home page starts with a box where you describe the app you want. I typed this:

Build a customer portal for Wrenfield Cleaning, a small home and office cleaning company. Visitors should see our services and prices and be able to ask for a quote. Customers log in to see their upcoming and past cleanings and their invoices. They can also book a cleaning and leave notes for the cleaner, like where to find the key.

Before it asked for an account, the AI asked me five questions:

• How should customers book a cleaning? I chose requests that the staff confirm.
• Should staff and customers have different access? Yes.
• How should customers pay their invoices? I chose both online and offline.
• How do users log in? With their email address.
• Can people sign up on their own? No, I invite them.

Then Softr asked me to create an account, so I would not lose my app. I signed up with an email address and a password. There was no confirmation code at this point. The last question was about the look. I picked a menu at the top on computers and at the bottom on phones, and one of 15 themes.

Building took a little under two and a half minutes. The AI created four tables with eight sample records each, plus nine sample users. My account also started a seven-day trial of the Business plan on its own, without a card. Paid features carry a small badge in the editor, so you can see what you would lose on the free plan.

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What the AI built

The customer home page had three counters at the top and tabs for cleanings and invoices. Staff got an admin page with all bookings on a board. Bookings and invoices each had a page of their own. The AI also set up user groups for customers and staff. A user belongs to a group because of a role field in the users table.

Softr lets you look at the app as any of your users. I picked Henry, a sample customer. His counters showed the company's totals. He had two bookings, but the counters said 3 upcoming cleanings.

His invoices had a "Pay invoice" button. It opened a form where Henry could change the invoice status to Paid. No payment was involved.

Visitors who were not logged in only saw a login page. The AI's own summary said that visitors could see the services and ask for a quote. Customers also had no way to book a new cleaning. They could only change or cancel the bookings they already had.

Small things were off too. Service durations showed as "0d 2h 00m 00s 000ms". Some sample invoices belonged to the bookings of other customers.

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Asking the AI to fix its own mistake

The editor has an AI co-builder in a chat panel. I asked it this:

The three numbers at the top of the Home page count the bookings and invoices of all customers. Each customer should only see their own numbers.

Its answer was its internal plan, with block IDs and command names. It ended with "Let me write the response." Nothing in the app changed. So I wrote:

Nothing changed. Please add the filters to the three numbers now.

This time it added a filter to each counter within seconds. Henry's counters now matched his own bookings and invoices. The two requests cost 0.10 and 0.11 AI credits. In the editor, the new filters show a short code where you would expect a name, so they are hard to check by eye.

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Letting customers book a cleaning

I added a "Book a cleaning" button above the customer's list of cleanings. It opens a form that creates a new booking. Two fields are hidden. One sets the customer to the logged-in user, and the other sets the status to Pending. Customers pick a service and a date. They can also leave a note for the cleaner.

As Henry, I booked a cleaning. It appeared as Pending, with the price of the service filled in. The date field had no time, so the booking showed 12:00 AM. Customers can pick any date. There is no calendar with free time slots.

Then I looked at the app as Nora from the staff. On her board, she dragged the booking from Pending to Confirmed, and the status changed in the database.

I also removed the AI's "Pay invoice" button. In its place, the invoice page now says how to pay:

Please pay by bank transfer within 14 days and use the invoice number as the reference. We mark the invoice as paid when the money arrives.

New blocks always land at the top of the page, so I moved this one down. Its heading came out black instead of the theme color.

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A public home page for visitors

The AI had made the whole app private. For visitors, I built a new page with three blocks:

• A header with a photo and two buttons. One asks for a quote, the other opens the customer login.
• The services with their prices, straight from the Services table.
• A form for quote requests, which saves each request in the Quotes table.

The photo comes from the stock photos in Softr's asset library. Header buttons can open a page or a link, but they cannot scroll down to a section. I linked the quote button to the form's position on the page with "#form1".

The services grid connected to the Services table on its own. It came with an "Add record" button and some filters I did not need, so I removed them. The form started with sample questions. I replaced them with my own fields and linked each one to a column in the Quotes table.

Finally I made the new page the home page. The AI's customer home page became the Portal page. Page rules now send customers to the portal after they log in, and staff to the admin page.

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Colors and the phone layout

The theme panel controls colors and fonts for the whole app, and it has a library of over 30 themes. I changed the background color of the cards to a paler, grayer green, and every card followed.

On phones, the layout adapts on its own. The services show in two columns, and logged-in customers get a menu bar at the bottom. Visitors see no header at all, so the company name and logo are missing on phones. For logged-in customers, the "Made with Softr" badge covers half of the "Book a cleaning" button. Removing the badge needs Pro.

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An email for each quote request

Softr has its own automations, called workflows. I made one that emails the office when a new quote request comes in. The trigger is a new record in the Quotes table, and the action sends an email.

The default sender is for testing only and allows 30 emails a day. Your own sender address needs Pro. Before I could test the workflow, I had to confirm my email address. Until then, the test failed with an unexpected error, and only a small message at the bottom of the screen gave the reason. The confirmation email had arrived at sign-up, and I had not opened it yet.

Softr reported both runs as successful. One was a test, the other a real quote request from the live site. Neither email reached my inbox, not even the spam folder. Softr's invitation emails arrived within seconds, so email in general worked. I could not find out where the workflow emails got stuck.

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Publishing the portal

Publishing gives the app a random address on softr.app. I changed it to wrenfield-cleaning.softr.app. Your own domain needs Basic or higher. After that, changes go live when you click "Publish updates".

As a visitor, I sent a quote request through the live form. It showed a thank-you message, and the request appeared in the Quotes table. Its status was empty, because the form does not set one. The phone field picked the country from my location.

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Inviting a customer

In my portal, customers cannot sign up on their own. I invite them. In the Users tab, I added Maya, a test customer with a second email address of mine.

The invitation arrived after about nine seconds. You can edit its text, and it ends with a line that promotes Softr. Its link opened a login page. Softr then sent Maya a six-character code by email, and she was in.

During the trial, customers log in with a code by email. Softr's pricing page lists these codes from Pro. On the free plan, customers log in with a password.

After the login, Maya landed on the public home page, and the menu had no link to her portal. I added a "My portal" link to the menu.

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What one customer could see of another

Logged in as Maya, I opened the link to one of Henry's bookings. The page showed his address and the code for his garage. The links contain a long random code, so a customer cannot easily guess them. But the search box in the header listed every booking and every invoice of the company. Each result opened, including a booking from another customer with a note on where his key is hidden.

Softr lists this search as a Business feature, and it was on because of the trial. Its settings panel warns that you should set up global data restrictions, so users cannot reach records they should not see. Those restrictions are a Business feature too.

On the cheaper plans, the fix is a filter on each block that shows customer data. I added one to each block on the booking and invoice pages. It shows a record only when the customer's email address matches the logged-in user. Then I switched the search off and published again.

When Maya opened Henry's booking link again, the page showed nothing. Her own booking opened as before. One side effect is that staff can no longer open bookings on these pages either. They would need a detail page of their own.

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Search engine settings

Each page has its own title and description. A switch hides a page from search engines. The app settings have a share image and a default description for all pages. Both start with Softr's own, so links shared on social media show Softr until you change them. You can also edit the robots.txt file and add redirects.

I hid my demo from search engines. The live pages carried the noindex tag, and the sitemap was empty.

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Selling and payments

Softr has no online shop. There are no blocks for products or a cart. When I searched the block library for "cart", it offered to build a custom block with AI.

For payments, Softr connects to your own Stripe account. You paste two keys from Stripe into Softr's settings. Then you can use payment blocks for subscriptions and one-off payments, for example to sell access to parts of an app. Softr's help pages also describe PayPal buttons, which need the custom code block from Pro.

I did not create a Stripe account, so I did not test payments. For Wrenfield Cleaning, the invoices stay on bank transfer.

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A calendar for the staff

For the staff, I added a calendar to the admin page. It shows all bookings in a month view. Bookings without a time show up as all-day events. Softr's pricing page lists the calendar on every plan.

Speed

I ran the public home page through Google's PageSpeed Insights once. On a simulated phone, it scored 30 out of 100, and the largest element took 13.4 seconds to appear. The layout also jumped while the page loaded. On a computer, it scored 79. The search score of 61 comes from my choice to hide the demo from search engines.

For a portal that customers open now and then, this matters less than for a website that has to win new customers.

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What Softr costs

I checked Softr's pricing page on November 2, 2026. Softr lists its prices in US dollars, and tax comes on top at checkout.

Softr counts two kinds of app users. Team users share your company's email domain. Customers with Gmail or other free addresses count as client users. The people who build the app with you are called builders. Each plan includes some, and more cost extra.

For Wrenfield Cleaning, the free plan and Basic only cover five customers. A cleaning company with more customers needs Pro, which costs $1,188 a year on yearly billing. Pro also brings separate groups for staff and customers. Customers can then log in with a code by email. The global data restrictions that would have protected the bookings need Business.

AI use is cheap. Building the portal used 0.98 AI credits, and each fix request used about 0.1. New accounts get 50 bonus credits, and the free plan adds 5 a month.

Every new account starts with a free trial, without a card. Mine was the Business plan for seven days. When it ends, the account moves to the free plan. Softr lets you extend the trial once by picking a plan to try.

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Leaving Softr

You can take your data with you. Each table in Softr's database has an "Export to CSV" option. I found no way to export the pages themselves. If you move to another tool, you rebuild the portal there.

Who should use Softr

Softr fits a small business that wants a login area for its customers on top of data it keeps in tables. For Wrenfield Cleaning, the AI gave me a working first version in a few minutes, and the editor made it easy to change.

The part that needs care is who can see what. The AI got it wrong in several places, and I only found the problems by looking at the app as a customer. Do that before you invite real customers, and check each page and the search.

For a portal with more than five customers, plan for Pro at $99 a month on yearly billing. If you need a website with a contact form or an online shop, a regular website builder is the better fit.

What I'm building

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