The three criteria that decide
First criterion: how standard your sales process is. If your sales cycle looks like that of thousands of companies, a contact, a quote, a follow-up, a signature, an off-the-shelf CRM covers it very well, for a reasonable subscription. There is no point building what the market already does correctly.
Second criterion: the place of your sales method in your competitive advantage. If the way you qualify, price or follow up is precisely what makes you win, pouring it into the mould of a generic tool means erasing what sets you apart.
Third criterion: the full cost over 3 to 5 years, the one the advertised price never shows. Per-seat subscriptions, added modules, integrations, and the time spent working around the tool. That total is what separates the two options, almost never the first month's price.
The signs an off-the-shelf CRM is no longer enough
The most common sign: you pay per seat for features nobody opens. An off-the-shelf CRM is designed for thousands of different companies; you use a fraction of it and pay for all of it, every month, for every seat.
Second sign: re-entry. Opportunities are copied into a spreadsheet for the forecast, orders re-typed into invoicing, follow-ups tracked somewhere else. Every copy costs time and introduces errors nobody sees until the leadership meeting.
Third sign: the tool dictates the method. You have given up tracking an indicator because “the CRM can't do it”. The day the software decides how you sell, the custom question is on the table.
The financial tipping point
The calculation is two curves. Off-the-shelf: subscription per seat, multiplied by team size and by 60 months, plus modules, plus integrations, plus workaround time. Custom: a build from €6,000 excl. VAT as a Sprint, then running costs from €250 excl. VAT per month with the Care plan.
Drawn over 5 years, the two curves cross in most configurations once the team exceeds a few seats. Before the crossing point, off-the-shelf wins. After it, every month of subscription pays for a tool that still does not belong to you.
Our public calculator runs this comparison in 5 minutes with your own numbers: team size, current subscriptions, re-entry time. Change the assumptions and the result updates immediately, no email required. The decision becomes a matter of reading two curves.
The hybrid path: off-the-shelf at the centre, custom at the edges
Replacing everything is not the only option. The pattern that often works: keep the off-the-shelf CRM at the centre, for contacts and pipeline, and build custom what it cannot do: complex pricing, the client portal, the management cockpit.
The two worlds are then connected: data entered once flows everywhere, with no copying. This path preserves the investment already made, the team's habits and the history. A first custom module is handled as a Sprint, from €6,000 excl. VAT.
It is often the best first step: it removes the most expensive friction without forcing a migration, and it lets you judge custom software on real results before going further. If the trial is conclusive, the extension is decided module by module, at the pace of your priorities.
What a migration really costs
A migration is never just an export followed by an import. Existing data must be cleaned, de-duplicated, converted to the new model, then verified field by field on a sample. With us, this data migration is a project milestone in its own right, priced in the quote.
Add change management: training the team on their real records, and a dual-running period during which the old tool remains available for reading. That period reassures people and secures the switch, and it is planned well ahead.
The hidden cost of a failed migration is distrust: a team that cannot find its data goes back to its spreadsheets. That is why we validate the migrated data with the users before switching anything off.