The published platform limits that decide what a portal can do
Every platform publishes the numbers that decide whether a portal can do what your users expect. Here is what three vendors publish today, where we read it, and how to check your own edition before you commit.
By David, The Goodstack Company.
Read the limits page before you watch the demo
Portal decisions usually get made on a demo. The numbers that decide whether the portal can do the job sit somewhere quieter, in the vendor's own limits and licensing documents.
This page reads three of them. Every figure below comes from a document we fetched ourselves, with the date we read it. Check the current version for your own edition, because these documents change between releases.
Three questions to ask of any published number
- What is counted. API calls, sign-ins, unique people, or page views.
- The window. Ten seconds, twenty four hours, or a calendar month.
- Who shares the allowance. One user, one app, one account, one org, or one site.
The third question is where portal projects get surprised. An allowance shared by a whole company and one owned by a single integration look the same on the page.
Salesforce: the allowance belongs to the org
The Salesforce Developer Limits and Allocations Quick Reference, which carries the line "Last updated: September 11, 2026" and which we read on 19 September 2026, gives the total inbound API request allocation for an Enterprise Edition org as 100,000 calls per 24-hour period, plus the number of licenses multiplied by the calls per license type, plus any purchased API Call Add-Ons. The same table row reads "Professional Edition with API access enabled", which tells you API access is a condition at that edition.
The per-license figures matter more than the headline for a portal, because external users sit on their own license types. That quick reference, read on 19 September 2026, lists API calls per license type per 24 hours including Salesforce at 1,000, Customer Community at 0, Customer Community Login at 0, Customer Community Plus at 200, Customer Community Plus Login at 10, Partner Community at 200 and Partner Community Login at 10.
Read those carefully. They describe what each license adds to the org's API allowance, and nothing about what a person holding that license sees or does after signing in. The same document sends readers to a separate Salesforce Help page for Experience Cloud limits, and we say below what happened when we tried to read it.
Then comes the sentence that decides how the allowance behaves in practice. The quick reference, read on 19 September 2026, states: "Limits and allocations are enforced against the aggregate of all API calls made to the org in a 24-hour period. Limits and allocations are not on a per-user basis."
The portal, the warehouse sync, the marketing tool and the finance integration all draw on one number. A portal launched into an org where three integrations already run starts with whatever those three leave behind. Ask your administrator for the org's current API usage before anyone sizes the work.
The same quick reference, read on 19 September 2026, also gives a concurrent limit of 25 inbound requests lasting 20 seconds or longer for production orgs and sandboxes. Watch that one when a portal screen fires a slow query for every user at nine in the morning.
HubSpot: the burst belongs to the app, the day belongs to the account
HubSpot's developer page "API usage guidelines and limits", read on 19 September 2026, publishes rate limits for privately distributed apps by product tier: 100 requests per 10 seconds per app and 250,000 per day per account on Free and Starter, 190 per 10 seconds per app and 625,000 per day per account on Professional, and 190 per 10 seconds per app with 1,000,000 per day per account on Enterprise.
The shape of those limits is the useful part. That page, read on 19 September 2026, says the burst limit "applies individually per app" and that the daily limit "is shared across all apps within the same HubSpot account". A portal is one more app against a daily allowance your marketing and sales tooling already spends.
Public apps are counted differently again. The same page, read on 19 September 2026, states that for publicly distributed OAuth apps each HubSpot account that installs the app is limited to 110 requests every 10 seconds. If you are buying packaged portal software from the marketplace, ask how it behaves at that limit.
Microsoft Power Pages: the meter counts people
Microsoft's Power Platform licensing FAQs, dated 14 August 2026 on the article and read on 19 September 2026, describes Power Pages licensing as capacity based, with two capacities by user type: authenticated users per website per month, and anonymous users per website per month.
The counting rules sit in the same FAQ, read on 19 September 2026. Authenticated users per website per month are calculated as unique users who log into the website in a calendar month, and uniqueness is determined using the ID of the Dataverse contact record the user is mapped to. That FAQ, read on the same date, says an authenticated capacity pack is 100 users, an anonymous pack is 500 users, and the minimum authenticated capacity assignable to an environment is 25.
So the cost driver here is how many distinct people sign in during a month. A portal that gives every contact a login is a different purchase from one with two named users per account, even with identical screens.
The same question in three shapes
| Platform | What the published limit counts | Who shares the allowance | Document we read on 19 September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce | Inbound API calls in a 24-hour period | The whole org, in aggregate | Salesforce Developer Limits and Allocations Quick Reference |
| HubSpot | Requests in ten seconds, and requests in a day | The app for the burst, the account for the day | API usage guidelines and limits |
| Power Pages | Unique signed-in and anonymous people in a calendar month | The individual website | Power Platform licensing FAQs |
What we could not verify
The Salesforce quick reference points readers to a Salesforce Help page named Experience Cloud User Licenses. On 19 September 2026 that page returned a loading screen with no readable text to the tools we use, so nothing from it appears here. If external user licensing decides your project, open it in a browser and read it yourself.
Nothing here was measured in a live org or account. These are published figures, read on one day. The HubSpot page carries no visible last updated date, so all we can tell you is when we read it.
Five questions to put to any platform or portal vendor
- Which document publishes the limit for my edition or tier, and when was it last updated?
- Is the allowance counted per user, per app, per account, per org or per site?
- What is the window: ten seconds, a day, or a calendar month?
- What happens at the limit: an error, a queue, a slower response, or a charge?
- Who watches usage after launch, and where does it show up?
An answer of "that has never been a problem" is worth writing down and asking about again.
Where we stand
We build custom portals. If you read these documents and decide the platform you already own fits, we get no work from you. Treat this page as a starting point and read the documents yourself.
The second part matters more. Anything we build on top of these platforms runs inside the same published limits. A custom screen that reads Salesforce data spends calls from the same org allowance, and a custom app in a HubSpot account draws on the same daily account limit. We cannot buy our way past a published number any more than a packaged product can. What a build changes is how many calls a screen makes, when batch work runs, what gets cached, and what a user sees when a limit is reached.
Goodstack has no partnership, reseller agreement or affiliation with Salesforce, HubSpot or Microsoft, and none of them has reviewed this page.
What to do with this
Pull the limits document for your own edition, write the three answers next to each system your portal will touch, and take that sheet into your next vendor call. If the roles and actions are still unsettled, our comparison of Experience Cloud and a custom portal covers that part first.