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.
Strip a CRM to what most small sales teams use and you get five tables and a board. The expensive editions sell workflow automation, forecasting, territory rules and an app ecosystem. Some teams need those. Many pay for them and use the board.
Twenty's repository is mostly AGPLv3, with files marked as enterprise under a commercial licence that needs a subscription in production. Check which features you need are in the open part before planning around them. Running it unmodified for your own team is the common case and is simple under the AGPL. Modifying it and offering it to others brings source obligations.
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With AI coding tools, a CRM that fits a specific sales process is a few weeks of work for one experienced engineer: the tables, a pipeline board, an activity log, email logging, import, and permissions. The hard parts are not the screens. They are deduplication, the email and calendar sync, and reporting people trust.
Own the email sync carefully: Gmail and Microsoft 365 APIs have quotas and consent screens that take time to get approved.
Model activities as an append-only log, so the history survives any change to how deals are structured.
Give the AI assistant read access to the CRM's own database, not a copy. That is the payoff of owning it.
Export everything, including activities, notes, attachments and field history, not only records.
Map custom fields and picklists before importing; this is where most migrations go wrong.
Run both systems for one sales cycle, with the old one read-only.
Keep the raw export in S3. It is your audit trail if a number is questioned later.
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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.
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