The short answer
Buy your CRM if standard pipeline stages fit how you sell: Salesforce's published tiers run $25 to $550 per user monthly and deploy in weeks. Build when the sales process is genuinely yours, when integrations drive the value, or when per-seat licensing across a big team outruns a build commonly starting near $50,000.
What Do Buying and Building Cost?
The published numbers frame the choice cleanly.
| Buy (Salesforce-class) | Build | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | $25 to $100 per user monthly on published Starter and Pro tiers | Commonly $50,000 to $150,000 for a focused CRM, per 2026 cost guides |
| Enterprise reality | $175 to $550 per user monthly on published Enterprise and AI tiers | Scope-driven; integrations set the price |
| Time to live | Weeks | Three to six months for a focused build |
| Fit | Configurable within the vendor's model | Encodes your exact pipeline and automations |
| Ongoing | Per-seat forever, plus admin time | 15% to 25% of build annually, per industry guides |
| Key risk | Workflow drift into the tool's shape; seat costs compound | You own every feature request |
Where Is the Crossover for a Sales Team?
A 25-seat sales organization on a published $100 Pro tier pays $2,500 a month, $30,000 a year, before add-ons. On the published $175 Enterprise tier the same team runs $52,500 a year. Five years lands between $150,000 and $260,000.
A focused custom CRM at $90,000 plus 20% annual operation runs about $90,000 upfront and $18,000 a year, roughly $180,000 over five years, sitting inside the same band.
The money is close to a wash at this size; the decision is really about fit and integrations. Below 10 seats the subscription wins nearly every time. At 50 plus seats on premium tiers, the license line alone can justify the build.
When Is Buying Clearly Right?
A standard pipeline, lead, qualify, propose, close, belongs in a bought CRM, full stop. The vendor's mobile apps, email integrations, reporting, and ecosystem of admins are worth more than exact fit for ordinary selling. Buy when the team is small, when you need it running this month, when nobody internal will own a build's backlog, or when your process is still changing monthly, because a custom system encodes yesterday's process at engineering prices. The build case begins where the CRM stops being a contact list and becomes the operating system of the revenue: multi-party deals, residual tracking, underwriting steps, and integrations doing the heavy lifting.
How Should a Payments or Lending Business Decide?
The industries Batch Group lives in are where the build case gets real. A merchant services pipeline is not lead-to-close: it is application, underwriting, boarding, activation, and then a residual stream per account that generic CRMs price as an integration project on top of license fees. Lending pipelines carry offer terms, stips, and renewal triggers the same way. When the system of record must track money per account per month, the custom build stops being a luxury: it becomes the difference between a CRM and a spreadsheet empire beside one. [TODO: confirm with Tristan] the productized starting point Batch uses for Sub ISO CRM builds, and typical delivery timeline.
- Under 10 seats or a standard pipeline: buy, on the published entry tiers
- Price your five-year seat cost at published tiers against a scoped build quote
- List the integrations that carry the value; three or more deep ones favor building
- Residuals, underwriting, or per-account money tracking in the pipeline favor building
- Whoever builds it must also run it; demand the year-two plan in writing
Commonly Asked Questions
- What does Salesforce really cost per user?
- Published 2026 tiers run $25 Starter, $100 Pro, $175 Enterprise, and $350 to $550 for Unlimited and AI-heavy tiers, per user per month. Real deployments add admin time and integration costs on top of the seat price.
- How much does a custom CRM cost to build?
- Focused builds commonly run $50,000 to $150,000 per 2026 development cost guides, driven by pipeline complexity and integrations, plus the industry-standard 15% to 25% annual operation budget after launch.
- Can a custom CRM still connect to email and calendars?
- Yes. Standard integrations for email, calendars, and telephony are solved problems in a modern build. The integration work that actually costs money is the deep kind: processors, underwriting systems, and accounting, which is usually exactly where the custom value lives.
- What CRM does Batch Group use for its own divisions?
- Batch Group runs its five divisions on software its own engineering team built, including the systems behind its Sub ISO program. [TODO: confirm with Tristan] which internal stack details are shareable publicly.
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