Custom CRM development: when to build your own, and what it costs

A custom CRM is customer relationship management software built for one business: your contacts and organisations, the things you sell or look after, a pipeline with your own stages, the history of every conversation, and the reminders that make sure nobody is forgotten. With us, a custom CRM costs $15,000 to $40,000 ex GST and takes 6 to 12 weeks, with a written scope from a paid discovery workshop and a fixed price before the build starts. For many businesses a subscription CRM is the better answer, and a good developer says so. Building your own pays off when the CRM has to run the work as well as record it, or when the workarounds around a subscription already cost more than a build. This guide explains how to tell which you are, what a custom CRM costs, what goes in the first version and how to move off spreadsheets.

Every CRM keeps the same basic records: who your customers are, which organisation they belong to, what you have discussed and what happens next. A custom CRM keeps those records in the shape of your business rather than a general one.

That usually means three things a subscription handles awkwardly:

• Your own records. A building inspector tracks properties, an installer tracks sites and the equipment on them, a training provider tracks students and enrolments. In a general CRM these become custom fields bolted onto "contacts" and "deals". In a custom one they are the main records.
• Your own pipeline. The stages are the ones your team already talks about, with the rules that move a record from one stage to the next: who approves a quote, what has to be attached before a job starts.
• The work itself. A custom CRM often runs part of the operation too, such as quoting, scheduling, compliance checks or renewal reminders, so it is half CRM and half custom software for your process.

Subscribe more often than not. A subscription CRM is ready today, spreads its cost across many customers, is updated without you asking and usually comes with a phone app and connections to other tools. If you track leads, deals and follow-ups the way most businesses do, it will serve you well.

You have probably outgrown a subscription when several of these are true:

1. A spreadsheet lives beside it. The CRM holds the contacts, but the real work is tracked somewhere else.
2. Custom fields are everywhere. The records you care about do not fit the shape the product expects, so people work around it.
3. The CRM has to run the work. Quotes, jobs, scheduling, compliance or renewals happen outside it and are copied in by hand.
4. You pay for seats people barely use. Staff need one screen, but each needs a full licence.
5. Customers need to sign in. A place where customers see their own jobs, documents or invoices is a web app, and building it alongside the CRM avoids a second system.

Often the answer is both. Keep the subscription for what it does well, such as email marketing, and build the part no product does, connected to it. Integrations with Xero, Stripe, HubSpot and Google Workspace are a published add-on at $1,500 to $5,000 each. Our custom software development guide covers the wider build-or-buy question.

A custom CRM is built on our custom software package, which costs $15,000 to $40,000 ex GST. The low end of the range buys discovery and wireframes, sign-in with email, Google and passkeys with roles and permissions, a database, one core workflow (here, your pipeline), an admin panel, email notifications and live reports, deployment with continuous integration, documentation and a 30-day warranty. The warranty sits alongside the consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law and does not limit them.

What moves a CRM up the range is the amount of work:

• More pipelines or workflows. Sales, service and renewals as three separate processes cost more than one.
• More kinds of user. Sales staff, technicians, managers and an administrator each need their own screens and permissions.
• Existing data. Years of records in spreadsheets or an old system have to be cleaned, mapped and checked before they move across.
• Custom design. A clean, consistent interface is included; a design system in your brand is an add-on from $2,500.

Integrations ($1,500 to $5,000 each) and AI features (from $3,000), such as reading an enquiry email into a new lead for a person to confirm, are priced on top. The service page shows three example scopes, made up to show what sits at the low end, the middle and the top of the range.

The running costs are different from a subscription's. There is no per-seat licence for software you own; the ongoing cost is hosting and looking after it. Our care plan covers hosting, backups, monitoring, security updates, bug fixes and 2, 5 or 10 change hours a month for $300, $700 or $1,500 ex GST. A subscription's cost grows with every seat and every tier; a custom build's cost is mostly up front. Every figure we charge is on our pricing page.

The first version should do one pipeline well. Everything else waits until your team has used it for a while.

Usually in:

• Sign-in with roles, so each person sees what they need.
• Contacts and organisations, plus your own main record, such as sites, properties or students.
• The one pipeline, with your stages and the rules between them.
• Notes and a history of every call, email and change.
• Tasks and reminders, with email notifications when something is due.
• Search, filters and an admin panel.
• Live reports, such as the pipeline by stage and the follow-ups that are overdue.
• Your existing data, imported and checked.

Usually out, for now:

• Email marketing campaigns. A dedicated tool does this better; connect it if you need to.
• A native mobile app. The CRM is a web app, so it works in a phone's browser and can be added to the home screen.
• Complicated automation rules. Learn which ones your team actually needs first.
• A customer portal, unless it is the reason for the project. It makes a good second stage.

Writing down what is out, in the scope, stops it creeping back in during the build.

Imagine an electrical contractor in Melbourne's east with a team of technicians and a few hundred maintenance contracts. Customers and their sites live in a spreadsheet, quotes are written in a word processor, service reminders sit in a shared calendar and invoices are typed into Xero.

Version one has customers and their sites as the main records, one pipeline from enquiry to quote to signed contract, service-due reminders generated from each contract, and roles for the office, the technicians and an administrator. The one integration is Xero, so a completed service becomes a draft invoice; how a Xero integration works explains that part. The customer and site list moves across from the spreadsheet as part of the scope.

That project would be quoted within our $15,000 to $40,000 range, plus $1,500 to $5,000 for the Xero integration, and built in 6 to 12 weeks from the discovery workshop to launch.

Moving the data is part of the scope and the fixed price, so tell us early how much there is and where it lives. The work runs in six steps.

1. Find every copy. The main spreadsheet, the inbox folders, the notebook in the van and the export from the last system.
2. Decide what moves. Usually every current customer and open job, and a sensible amount of history. Older records can stay in a read-only archive.
3. Clean it. Duplicates, three spellings of the same company, missing phone numbers and notes typed into the wrong column.
4. Map it. Each column goes to a field in the new system, and anything that does not fit gets a decision rather than a guess.
5. Test the import on a copy. The people who use the data every day check a sample before anything goes live.
6. Pick a cut-over date. From that day, new records go into the CRM and the spreadsheet becomes read-only, so there is one source of truth.

If the data is wrong on the first day, people go back to the spreadsheet, so the cleaning is worth the time.

Write down the records your business tracks, the stages a customer moves through and the systems the CRM has to talk to. Then tell us about it. A founder replies with an estimate range within one business day. The written scope and the fixed price come out of the paid discovery workshop ($500 to $1,500, credited to the project if it goes ahead), which runs in the same five stages as every project on our process page. If a subscription CRM would serve you better, that is what we will say.