BIDGLORY FIELD GUIDE
D-Tools and Portal.io merged. Here's what it actually changes.
The announcement is more reassuring than most. It is also, read closely, a commitment to keep running three separate products — which is a different thing from having one.
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On 25 August, D-Tools and Portal.io announced they are now one company. Portal.io's founder becomes Chief Product Officer; Portal continues as its own business unit. If you use either product, you have probably already read the announcement twice looking for the catch.
The reassurances are real. Take them at face value.
We are not going to pretend otherwise, because the commitments are specific and specific commitments are worth something. In their own words: "Nothing changes for you today." No forced migration. Same support team, same channels, same terms. And notably — "No plans to end-of-life any product currently offered, including Portal.io, D-Tools Cloud, and D-Tools SI."
That is a better announcement than most mergers produce. Plenty of acquirers say "nothing changes" and mean "nothing changes this quarter." Naming all three products and saying none are being killed is a harder thing to say and an easier thing to be held to. Good.
Three products is still three products
Here is the part worth sitting with. The announcement describes "one team, one product vision, and three purpose-built products." Two of those things are new. The third is arithmetic.
D-Tools' own framing of the industry problem is exactly right, and we would not phrase it differently ourselves: integrators have long had to assemble their software from different vendors — one tool for proposals, another for design and project management, a third for service and the back office. That is a genuine, expensive, daily problem.
The answer on offer is that those tools now share an owner. Which is real progress on contracts, support and account management. It is not the same as sharing a data model. A number that moves between two products still moves between two products, however friendly the two companies have become, and one product vision spread across three roadmaps is one vision doing three jobs.
None of that makes it a bad outcome. If you are happy on D-Tools SI, this changes very little for you, which is precisely what they promised. But if the thing you were quietly hoping for was one system, the announcement is a polite no.
The question everybody now knows to ask
Anyone who has been in this industry for a while has watched a tool they depended on change hands, change price, or change its mind about what tier they belong in. So the real question an integrator asks after any merger is not "will my login still work on Monday." It is "what happens when this needs to make more money?"
That is a fair question. It is also a fair question to point back at us, so let us answer it first, before making any argument about anyone else.
Our answer, which is mostly just our licence
BidGlory is open source and free to self-host for companies under $1M/yr in sales. We do not sell you the software. We sell hosting and support — things that cost us real money to provide, which is the honest reason they cost you money.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A free tier that runs on someone else's servers is an expense on their balance sheet, and expenses eventually get looked at. A free tier you run yourself is not an expense on ours. There is no quarter in which someone at BidGlory discovers that free users are costing too much, because they are not costing us anything. You are paying the hosting bill, in the currency of running a server.
And the part that should actually reassure you: you do not have to believe any of this. The source is yours. If we get greedy, get bought, get bored, or get struck by lightning, the software still runs, on your hardware, with your data, and somebody else can maintain it. That is not a promise about our character. It is a property of the licence, and licences survive changes of management better than intentions do.
Our pricing is on the pricing page, in numbers, rather than behind a form. $299/month for managed hosting, $899 for Business, Enterprise from $2,500 — priced on bid volume, never per user, and that per-user commitment is in the licence itself rather than only in marketing copy. Compare that to how many vendors in this category will tell you what a seat costs before a sales call.
Where this leaves you
If you are on D-Tools SI or Cloud and it fits your shop, stay. We have written before about where D-Tools genuinely wins, and a merger with a long-time partner does not change that.
If what you actually wanted was one system — where the number on the proposal is the number in the bid grid because it is the same calculation, not a synced copy — that is the thing we built, and it is the thing three products cannot be.
And if you have been through enough vendor changes to be suspicious of anyone promising stability: fair. Read the licence instead of the promise. That is what it is for.
Quotations are from D-Tools' merger announcement of 25 August 2026. BidGlory is a product of ProjectThunder and is not affiliated with D-Tools or Portal.io. BidGlory is currently a Technology Preview, which is stated on the pricing page as well as here.