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Portera — A Phase-Aware AI Concierge for Rentals

Portera is an AI concierge SaaS for Costa Blanca holiday-rental agencies. Guests get instant, phase-aware answers over web chat, WhatsApp, or email; agencies onboard through a conversational setup flow. We own the architecture and run the platform — the canonical example of fractional CTO for a small SaaS.

Client
Portera (owner-operated SaaS)
Engagement
Fractional CTO + product build

The fractional-CTO shape. Portera is a small SaaS with a founder on sales (Brandon) and us on the entire technical side. It's what "owner-operated SaaS that needs senior architectural ownership but can't afford a full-time hire" looks like in practice.

What it does

A holiday-rental agency manages dozens of properties and fields the same guest questions over and over: where's the key, what's the WiFi, can we check in late, where's a good paella nearby. Portera answers them — instantly, in the guest's language, across web chat, WhatsApp, and email.

The trick is that it's phase-aware. The same guest gets different answers depending on where they are in the stay:

  • Pre-check-in — directions, access codes, arrival logistics.
  • During the stay — appliances, local recommendations, problems.
  • Post-stay — checkout steps, deposits, reviews.

Agencies don't fill out a config form to get there. They onboard through a conversational flow — Portera interviews them about their properties and builds the knowledge base from the conversation.

How it's built

Rails 8.1.2, Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus), Tailwind CSS v4, Import Maps — a deliberately boring, durable server stack. Devise for auth, Stripe for billing. The concierge runs on the Anthropic Claude API (Sonnet), with Twilio carrying WhatsApp and Postmark handling inbound and outbound email so a guest can just reply to a message and be understood.

The architecture choices are the point of a fractional-CTO engagement: pick a stack that one senior engineer can own for years, keep the AI surface narrow and well-grounded, and make onboarding cheap enough that the sales side can actually close.

Why it's on this page

Portera is the template for the second kind of work we do: not a one-off build, but ongoing senior ownership of a real product. We run two of these at a time alongside the AIT engagement without it getting thin.

Have a SaaS that needs a senior engineer to own it? Let's talk.