Advice on Building a Webflow-Based Portfolio Service with Customizable Pages and Monthly Billing

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1

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for some guidance on a project I’m working on, and I’d really appreciate your insight.

I’ve been using Webflow only for my own personal projects, and I have no exerience with agency models.

But now I’m planning to build a portfolio service aimed at a very specific target audience.

The Concept:

• I have a central potfolio site: example.com

• When someone signs up (manual onboarding as I would offer a lot more besides hosting), they get their own customizable portfolio page, based on my fixed branded template.

• I’m deciding between two URL structures:

• Option A: Subdomain (e.g., john-smith.example.com)

• Option B: Subdirectory (e.g., example.com/john-smith)

I won’t be transferring ownership of the sites—everything stays under my umbrella. It’s similar to how YouTube works: users can create their own pages, but everything remains under the YouTube brand. In my case, it’s a completely different concept, but the ownership model is similar.

What I Want to Offer:

• Create the initial portfolio page for them (service fee, billed separatly from Webflow)

• A monthly subscription model (e.g., $15/month)

• Editing role: The user should be able to edit their own page. And only specific parts of their page (e.g., text, images, one URL inside a code embed) — but the core layout/design stays fixed.

Please help me to understand what I can do with Webflow regarding this business model, and what I cannot.

Questions:

  1. Webflow Plans & Editor & Workspaces: Can Webflow support this type of model? Their plans and workspace structure is very confusing.

  2. User Permissions: Is it possible to let users edit their own pages on a domain that belongs to me — and within those, only specific elements — without giving them access to the entire site?

  3. Can I have dozens, and later even +100s of customers who can edit their own pages?

  4. URL Structure: Is there any significant advantage (Webflow client management, technical etc) to using subdomains vs subdirectories in this case?

  5. Billing: How could I best implement recurring billing (e.g., $15/month) for each user? Would this need to be handled externally from Webflow?

Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions — especially from anyone who has built something similar using Webflow (or knows where its limitations lie).

2

Familiarize yourself with the workspace seat pricing and site plan models well.

But in general you could achieve something like this as follows;

  • You create a separate site for each client, based on whatever template you want
  • You can, if you want, place it under a subdomain like bob.site.com or you can simply buy them a cheap domain like bob.com. Webflow won’t care.
  • Each site needs its own site plan, you choose which plan is needed, probably basic or CMS
  • Webflow can bill that to the client. Currently any additional $ would have to be billed separately by you, however you like.
  • You can give the customer EDIT access in several different ways, for now it would be the free legacy editor. Once client seats is launched it would be the designer edit mode. If you want designer edit mode now, you can pay for a partial seat.
  • Yes they’d be limited to their site. you can repeat this process for as many sites as you want
3

As usual, @memetican is on target, and I can confirm this since I originally tried to go down this route for a community of about 6k businesses. In the end, the limitations were too great for me and my clients, so I chose to roll my own solution using an open-source framework. If you can make this work, then do it. The nice part about Webflow is that there is no infrastructure to maintain. That is part of what you are paying for.