Building a CRM, an analytics pipeline or a help desk used to be a year of work. With AI coding tools and open-source cores it is weeks. That changes the math on per-seat pricing and on handing your customer data to someone else. When it pays to run your own, when it does not, and what you take on.
Most business software is a database, some forms, a few reports and an integration or two. For fifteen years the cost of building that was high enough that renting it per seat was obviously right. Two things changed. Good open-source versions now exist for most categories, and AI coding tools have cut the cost of adapting or building the rest. Meanwhile per-seat prices went up, and every vendor is adding AI features that read your data.
That does not mean you should replace everything. It means the question is worth asking again, tool by tool.
Running your own is not free. You pay for hosting, and somebody has to own upgrades, backups and security. For a small team on AWS, hosting one of these tools is usually tens of dollars a month. The real cost is the person-hours, and that is the number to be honest about.
Book a free 30-minute call. You'll leave knowing what we'd do first and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
Every SaaS tool is another copy of your customer data, under another company's security programme, in your next security questionnaire.
AI features change what vendors do with data. Read the terms. Slack, for example, says it does not train generative models on customer data without opt-in, but does analyse messages to build its predictive models unless a workspace owner emails to opt out.
Exports are rarely complete. History, attachments, custom objects and audit trails are where migrations break.
Your data in your own database is something an AI assistant you control can read. Locked in a vendor, it is whatever their AI feature does with it.
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Book a free 30-minute call about it. Bring your setup and your bill; you'll leave knowing what we'd do first and roughly what it costs, whether or not you hire us.
Or keep reading
Replacing Salesforce or HubSpot: A Self-Hosted CRM (Twenty) or One You Build
A CRM is contacts, companies, deals, activities and a pipeline view. At $90–$195 per seat per month, ten seats cost $11k–$23k a year. Twenty is an open-source CRM you can run yourself; building on Postgres is the other route. What each option costs, what you lose, and how to migrate without losing history.
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As of October 30, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.