Build Your Own CRM or Buy One: What Each Really Costs

Salesforce charges $195 per user per month for its Core plan, and it will only bill you yearly. Ten salespeople on that plan costs $23,400 a year, before anyone adds anything to it.

That number is why people ask whether to build their own CRM instead. It is the right question, and the answer is usually no.

COM8 STUDIO sells a ready-made CRM, COM8 Realty, and we also build custom software. We get paid either way, so we have no reason to push you toward one answer.

The published prices

Every price below is per user, per month, in US dollars, read from each vendor's own page on 16 September 2026.

Read the billing column, not just the price. On Salesforce's pricing page, only the $25 Starter Suite can be paid monthly. Everything above it is sold on a yearly contract. Salesforce's own FAQ says "Most Salesforce products use annual contracts, but Salesforce subscription terms vary."

So the choice is not $195 a month. For ten people it is $23,400, committed for a year, paid to a company you have not worked with yet.

HubSpot's famous $7 is a promotion. HubSpot's own page says the Starter Customer Platform is "normally priced at $20/month per seat" and that the discount is for new customers, for a limited time. To get $7 you pay for the whole year upfront, which is $84 for each person. Pay month to month and it is $10. HubSpot does not publish what you pay when the promotion ends.

The bill that arrives after you sign

Onboarding, support and going over your limits all cost extra, and no pricing page shows it.

A setup fee you cannot refuse. Onboarding means the vendor setting the system up and training your staff on it. HubSpot does not let you skip it. HubSpot's Sales Hub page carries this footnote: "Cost shown does not include the required, one-time Professional Onboarding for a fee of $1,500." Enterprise onboarding is $3,500. On Marketing Hub the same fees are $3,000 and $7,000. HubSpot calls them required, and you pay it once for the whole company however many people you have.

Support priced as a percentage. Zoho includes Classic support with any paid edition. Premium support "Costs 20% of your subscription fee". Enterprise support costs 25% of the annual subscription and needs at least 50 user licences.

Salesforce does the same. Its Premier Success Plan costs "30% of net license fees". Salesforce does not define net license fees anywhere on the page, so you cannot work out the cash amount before you call them. The Signature plan shows no price at all, only "Contact your account executive".

A percentage is not a fixed amount. It grows every time you add a person.

Limits you meet later. Almost everyone connects the CRM to something else, so the website contact form, WhatsApp or the accounting system can drop records straight into it. That connection is called an API, and the vendor caps how much of it you may use each day.

Zoho counts your use in credits over any 24 hours. The free plan gets 5,000. Standard gets 50,000 plus 250 for every person you pay for. Professional gets 50,000 plus 500 each. Enterprise gets 50,000 plus 1,000 each. Go past that and you buy more, and Zoho publishes the rates: $0.14 per 1,000 extra credits for the first 25,000, falling to $0.025 above 250,000.

HubSpot allows 500 credits a month on Starter, 3,000 on Professional and 5,000 on Enterprise. The credits go to the company account, not to each person, so hiring more staff does not bring more, and anything left over disappears at the end of the month. Run out and HubSpot refuses every further request, returning the error code 429 until the limit resets. In plain terms, that is the day enquiries stop arriving in your CRM and nobody can work out why.

One thing we could not find a price for. Salesforce marks extra storage, extra credits and extra sandboxes, which are private practice copies of your system, as "Available for purchase" without publishing what any of them cost. Its own help page says to contact your account executive for extra API requests. We looked and could not find a published figure anywhere, so anyone quoting you one is guessing.

The third option nobody puts in the comparison

Between paying per user forever and building from nothing, there is open source.

Open source means the software is published for anyone to download, run and change, with no licence to buy. You still pay for the server that runs it and for whoever looks after it.

SuiteCRM is free to download. Its pricing page lists the software cost as "Free to download", then adds "+ your infrastructure costs", and answers its own question "Are there really no per-user fees?" with "None." Infrastructure means the server and the people who keep it running.

That page also publishes two worked examples:

• Fully managed hosting with standard support: £1,560 a year, plus a one-time £2,520 setup and training fee.
• Fully managed hosting with SuiteASSURED, their paid warranty and support package: £3,950 a year, plus the same £2,520.

Compare that with $23,400 a year for ten people on Salesforce Core. Before you switch, check the licence.

Free to use is not free to change. SuiteCRM is released under a licence called the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. So is EspoCRM, which moved from GPLv3 to AGPLv3 on 28 December 2023.

Section 13 of that licence is the part that catches people out. Pay a developer to change the software, then let anyone use it through a browser, including your own staff, and you have to hand those users a copy of your changed version if they ask for it. What you paid to build stops being yours alone. EspoCRM sells a separate commercial licence for companies that do not want that condition, and does not publish its price.

That is not a reason to avoid open source. It is a reason to decide before your developer starts changing things.

What building actually means

The build price is the part everyone asks about and the part nobody can verify. Every figure you will find online comes from a development agency quoting its own work, or from a directory that surveys agencies and sells them leads. No independent body publishes a custom CRM build cost with a stated method.

Maintenance is the cost you can check, and it never stops.

Fixing security holes never finishes. Software makers find flaws in their own products every month and publish repairs, called patches. Somebody has to install them. The American government body that writes security standards, NIST, says that this work "should be considered a standard cost of doing business and should be rigorously followed and tracked". It also sets out the trade-off: patch fast and you risk breaking things, test first and you stay exposed longer.

Most companies are too slow to install them. Attackers read those repair announcements too, and they know exactly which companies have not installed them yet.

Verizon's 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found that walking in through a hole the maker had already announced is now the most common way a break-in starts, at 31 percent, ahead of stolen passwords at 13 percent. In 2025 companies fully closed only 26 percent of the holes on the official list of the ones attackers are known to be using, down from 38 percent the year before. The median time to finish the job rose to 43 days, so half of them took even longer.

If you take card payments, somebody else sets your deadline. The card industry's own security rules, PCI DSS version 4.0.1, require critical security patches within one month of release.

When you buy a CRM, that work is the vendor's. When you build one, it is yours, every month, forever.

If you are buying from the UAE

Two things change, and both cost money.

There is no dirham price. Salesforce's pricing page has a currency selector offering six currencies: US Dollar, Australian Dollar, British Pound, Euro, Japanese Yen and Swedish Krona. Dirhams are not among them. Microsoft publishes Dynamics 365 Sales prices only on its US site, and its UAE product pages return a 404. So you pay in dollars, and the exchange rate is your risk.

A foreign CRM can push you over the VAT registration line. The vendor is abroad, so the bill arrives with no VAT on it. That does not mean no VAT is due. Under Article 30(2) of Federal Decree-Law No. 8 of 2017, a service bought from a supplier based outside the UAE counts as bought inside the UAE. So you put the 5 percent on your own VAT return and pay it yourself. Accountants call that the reverse charge.

Article 19 of the same law then adds what you spend abroad to your own sales when it works out whether you have to register for VAT at all. You must register once the total passes AED 375,000 over the previous 12 months, and you may register by choice at AED 187,500. A small company with a large software bill can cross that line without selling any more than last year.

HubSpot handles this openly. Its billing documentation says it is registered for VAT in the UAE and charges UAE customers who are not VAT registered. Put your tax registration number, the TRN, on your HubSpot account and the charge stops.

The failure numbers nobody can trace

You will be shown a statistic to push you one way. We tried to trace the common ones. Almost none of them survive.

Two figures did survive, and both come with conditions.

CSO Insights surveyed 1,275 companies in 2006. Of the firms that had installed a CRM, fewer than 40 percent could say that more than 90 percent of their staff really used it. That is twenty years old and describes the software of its time.

Capterra surveyed 2,452 managers in July 2025 across 11 countries, and 57 percent of CRM users called their CRM critical, more than any other tool in the survey. Two things to know: none of those 11 countries was in the Middle East, and Capterra is owned by Gartner and is paid for referring buyers to software vendors.

How to decide

Five questions, in order. The first clear answer usually ends it.

1. How many people will use it? Paying per person gets worse with every person you hire. At three users, buying is almost always cheaper. At fifty, run the yearly sum before you agree to anything.
2. Does a ready-made CRM fit how you already sell? If buying means changing only a few habits, buy. If the tool cannot hold your process at all, that is the real argument for building.
3. Who will patch it? Name the person. If there is no name, buy. A CRM nobody updates becomes the way attackers get in, and Verizon's figures show that is now the most common route.
4. Can you get your data out if you stop using it? Ask before you sign, not after.
5. Are your rules genuinely unusual? Unusual pricing, several brands or countries at once, or a workflow that no product can handle. Only then does building pay for the trouble.

If you answered "buy" and still want it to fit properly, there is a middle path most people miss: buy a ready-made product and pay to have it configured and integrated. That costs far less than building from nothing and skips the permanent patching job.

Where we sit

We build and run COM8 Realty, a CRM used by Dubai brokerages, so we pay the hosting and we fix it when it breaks. We also build custom software for companies whose rules do not fit any product.

Most companies asking this question should buy. If you want help working out which one you are, we will tell you, including when the answer means you do not need us.