Building your own CRM is the easy part

Since the boom of AI there has been a drastic rise in companies building their own CRMs. We are going to explore the reason for it, and look back at what caused it.

There is a number behind this, although it is not about CRMs specifically. McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey asked 1,719 people across 97 countries, and 32% said their organization had decided against buying at least one piece of software because they had built it themselves with AI coding tools instead. That share was highest in technology and healthcare. McKinsey does not break the answers down by type of software, so nobody can tell you how many of those were CRMs. What it does tell you is that a third of organizations have already made that call about something.

For some context, back during Covid, I was working at an outsourced marketing and sales agency in an operations role. We didn't have a centralised CRM and most of the time any work was being done on spreadsheets, or we were using a client's CRM. I decided to create a centralised CRM and started looking at providers. HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive were all evaluated and I came to the same conclusion every time: while HubSpot and Pipedrive had free plans, the scale the CRM would operate at meant implementing one would cost the business thousands per month, and none were very customizable for different client use cases and different types of data. In the end, I decided we would build our own.

At the time, unless you were a developer or could pay a developer to build the CRM, it wasn't a viable solution to build it from scratch. What I decided to do was use a workforce management platform with lots of customizability and turn it into a CRM which could be customized based on the different clients and was going to be easy to navigate for the sales reps.

It worked once built out but needed tweaking constantly, and because I had built it, I was the only one who knew how to customize it and get it working when things weren't right. This meant all data imports had to flow through me. I did eventually end up training another person how to customize it and import, however that was years later.

The point is, would I have been better off accepting the higher cost for the well-known providers and trying to make it work? Margin says no. The effort that went into building your own CRM says yes.

So why is the craze now building your own CRM if it's not worth the effort? Well, the simple answer is, it's a lot less effort now to build your own CRM with AI help.

Companies have always had different use cases for their CRM, whether it's tracking deals, inbound and outbound data for reps, or client management. Take HubSpot for example: their feature list is so huge that it covers almost every scope a business could require from a CRM. The caveat is that it comes at a cost, with constant bolt ons for different features.

Six years ago I had two separate objections to the big providers: too expensive, and not shaped like us. Today a small team can build the shape it wants without a developer on staff. So it's now a cost problem, not a customizability problem, because that one has been removed.

When we look at the cost side, it's clear the big providers have ramped up their prices, and Salesforce's price history is the best documented. It did not raise list prices at all for seven years. That freeze ended in August 2023 with an average rise of 9% across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industries and Tableau, which Salesforce justified by pointing at 22 releases, thousands of features and billions of dollars of research and development, including what it called recent generative AI innovations. A second followed on 1 August 2025, averaging 6%, that time only on Enterprise and Unlimited editions. Two increases in three years, after seven with none.

August 2023 was within months of generative AI arriving, and Salesforce used that same technology as part of its reason for the rise.

The reason they can keep doing it is that the big providers know that once you are in their ecosystem, it's harder to get out of than in, so they can hold you to ransom unless you want to do a costly migration to a new platform. Risks of migrating your CRM is what that bill looks like when somebody finally pays it.

Businesses no longer have to be held to ransom as they can build their own CRM from scratch and make it suit their needs perfectly, the exact same concept I had when building out the workforce management system into a CRM. So it's not a new concept, it's just that the moat and the willingness to change providers have been lowered drastically.

When you compare the cost of running your own CRM against one from a big provider, the sum people reach for is licence fees against build hours. That sum is wrong, because the build hours stop and the job does not. A provider's cost is a subscription: it recurs, it rises, and it arrives as an invoice somebody has to approve. A CRM you build costs you the build once, and then costs you a person for as long as you run it.

A CRM needs the same four things however you got it. Your data and the way you work are yours in both cases. Under that sit the software itself, keeping it online, and being able to show a regulator what it does with personal data. Buying is a decision about who carries those three.

So, if anyone can build their own CRM, why aren't the big providers panicking?

The market has spent 2026 changing its mind about exactly that, in both directions. Salesforce's share price fell about 30% over the first four months of the year, on the fear that AI would undermine software sold by the seat. It then rose 22.6% in a single day in late August when Agentforce numbers and raised guidance landed, and even after that it is still down for the year. HubSpot beat its own second-quarter figures on both earnings and revenue in August, and its shares fell 21% in after-hours trading anyway. Whatever you think a share price is telling you here, it was telling you something else a few months earlier.

The customer numbers point the other way, though not cleanly. HubSpot reported 306,446 customers at the end of June 2026, up 14% on the year, with revenue up 20%. The reason the shares fell anyway is in the detail: net new customers came in at 7,000 against the company's own target of 9,000 to 10,000, and management flagged longer sales cycles and more cautious buyers for the rest of the year. So more companies are signing up than ever, and fewer are signing up than the company expected. Both are true, and the second one is what the market traded on.

The reason goes back to my original argument: it's the effort required to maintain your own CRM, not build it. Building your own CRM works fine, the same as it did for me. However it's the hidden cost of having to maintain it, being the only one who knows how it works, and almost becoming the CRM manager as a full-time job. Unless you plan to stay at the company for 10 years, or you own the company, there's a risk attached to it. The person or team who built it are the only ones who know how it works and how to change it safely.

This is where the AI answer runs out. It made building easier. It has not made it easier to be the one person who understands what got built, and it does not sit in a compliance review, carry an uptime commitment, or take the call from the client.

In a small company the risk is small, and it makes it worth it rather than paying huge amounts to the big providers. For medium sized and large enterprise companies, the risk isn't always worth it. Having a reputable provider as a failsafe means outages in service, employees leaving and data compliance all fall on the provider, and companies are willing to pay for the privilege of not having to deal with it. It's much easier to explain to a client that you didn't get back to them because Salesforce was down, than to say your own in-house CRM messed up. There's a trust factor the big providers instil which isn't easy to remove or replicate.

Well, it depends on your use case and the size of your business, and your budget. My belief is that if you're a startup or small company of less than 25 to 40 employees, then yes, it makes absolute sense to build your own CRM, build it out to suit what you need and scale it as you scale.

Just don't build it in isolation. Build it with others, train as you go, have failsafes so the reliance is not on one person, and accept that the drop in spend on a CRM provider means more time and effort allocated to your own CRM.

If you are a mid-sized or larger business, unless there's a specific need or it's an obscene cost per year to use the big providers, building your own sounds exciting and looks like it will save the business money long term, but the problems will start stacking up. You will have to worry about maintenance, compliance and failsafes, and what happens if the team or the individual who built it resigns in the morning. CRMs for larger businesses are the lifeblood they run on, and it takes a very driven management team to enact that level of change across an organization.

Build your own CRM and you take on a job nobody plans for: getting data into it. There is no native importer, no validation anybody else wrote, and no template for your record shape, because your record shape did not exist until you invented it.

That is what the CRM Formatter's custom templates are for. Eight CRMs are built in, three of those take a direct push, and yours is neither. So you define the record shape yourself instead: your field names, your types, your required flags, and every row gets checked against it before you get a file out. Custom CRM templates sets out what you can define.

The useful part is that none of it has to go through one person, which is the trap I walked into. The API takes files and runs jobs, so the cleanup and the formatting happen on a schedule and your own importer collects the output. How to connect Operelio to a custom CRM is the whole thing end to end.

The cleaning is no different to anyone else's: screen out the duplicates, check each mailbox is real, check the companies still have a site that answers. What is different is the consequence of skipping it. A big provider's importer rejects a malformed row and tells you why. Yours does whatever you told it to do, because you wrote that part as well. The CRM import problem is what that looks like when nobody is checking.

The formatter itself, Health Check, merging and deduplicating all run on the free plan. Custom templates and the direct push begin on Starter, and the API is Pro and above. The pricing page has the full split.

Ultimately, the fact there is now less of a moat to having a CRM in the first place can only be a good thing. It means businesses now have the option of choice, and not just between which provider to go with. Will it mean the big providers start lowering their prices to reflect the reduction in the moat? Probably not. What it will lead towards is better service and more options from the big providers, hence the examples of HubSpot acquiring companies into its ecosystem to evolve their product line and capabilities. It bought Frame AI for conversation intelligence in January 2025 and folded it into Breeze, then XFunnel that October, which watches how a brand shows up in answers from ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.

The best part of it all is now the argument is not which provider do I go with, it's do I go with a provider or do we build our own.