What the build price covers
In short
The build price pays for the workflow, the screens and the reports your team uses every day, set up and tested before launch. The hosting and email accounts the CRM runs on are not in it: they sit on your own card, at cost.
Our three app prices mark the steps. $15,300 is a focused tool: one workflow, such as an inquiry moving from new to booked, a few roles and the reports you check every week. $23,800 covers several workflows with roles and permissions, email and text messages and an admin view. $34,000 adds card and bank payments, a portal where your customers sign in, and invoicing, which together make a whole back office.
Every step includes the parts people forget to price: logins with roles, screens that work on a phone, nightly backups with a restore that has been tested, and a working version early so your team can try it while the rest is built. The code sits in your repository from the first day. Moving your existing records in from another tool is priced in the plan, because it depends on how tidy they are.
These are starting prices from our price book, not a survey of what the market charges. What moves a project from one step to the next is the number of workflows and whether money changes hands inside the tool, far more than the number of screens.
Custom or off the shelf
In short
An off-the-shelf CRM costs little to start and charges for every person who signs in, every month. A custom one costs more up front and nothing per person, so the choice turns on the size of your team and how far your process sits from the product's.
The large CRM products price by the person. Salesforce lists its Sales Cloud editions per user per month, and HubSpot prices its paid plans per seat per month, with a free CRM for up to two users. For a team of two or three that is often the cheapest place to start, and nothing here argues against it.
The cost that does not show on the invoice is the workaround: the spreadsheet beside the CRM, the fields renamed to mean something else, the step someone does by hand because the product has no place for it. A custom CRM earns its build price when those workarounds cost the team more each month than the subscription saves.
| Off-the-shelf CRM | Custom CRM | |
|---|---|---|
| To start | A free plan or a first month, then setup time | A build price, from $15,300 with us |
| Each month | A subscription for every person who signs in | Hosting at cost, plus a support retainer |
| Fit to your process | You adapt your steps to its fields | It follows your steps |
| Who owns it | Your data is yours to export; the software is the vendor's | The code and the data are both yours |
| When it changes | When the vendor ships an update | When you ask, priced in writing first |
Swipe sideways to see every column
What it costs after launch
In short
A custom CRM keeps costing a little after launch: hosting on your own accounts and, if you want one, a support retainer for fixes, updates and small changes, priced as a share of the build each year with a monthly minimum.
The retainer pays for what any live software needs. The libraries the CRM is built on release fixes that have to be applied and tested, a tool it connects to changes and needs a fix on our side, and your process shifts in small ways that the screens should follow.
Larger changes, such as a new workflow or a portal added a year in, are change orders: priced in writing before anything is built. The figures under this guide work out the build range and the retainer for a few typical choices, straight from the price book.
A worked example (hypothetical)
In short
A small property manager that has outgrown a shared spreadsheet would usually start at the first app step, then add a portal and payments later as a change order.
Picture a property manager with four staff, tracking repair requests in a spreadsheet and a group text. The need is one workflow: a request comes in, gets assigned, gets scheduled and is closed with notes and photos. That is the first step at $15,300, with roles for the office and the field staff and a weekly report of open requests by building.
A year later the building owners want to see their own requests and pay invoices online. That is new work, a portal and payments, priced in writing as a change order before it starts. A build that began with both would have started at the $34,000 step instead.
What this means for a small business
In short
Start with the cheapest tool that fits and count the workarounds. When the time your team spends around the software costs more each month than a custom tool would, a build starts to pay for itself.
Before you ask anyone for a price, write down the steps an inquiry or a job takes from first contact to paid, and note where the current tool makes someone copy, retype or remember something. That list is most of what a written plan for a custom CRM needs.
Then count the people who sign in today and the ones you expect in two years. A subscription grows with the team and a custom tool does not, so the same list can favour a product for a team of three and a build for a team of twelve.