★ CRM · cost estimate

How Much Does It Cost to Build a Custom CRM?

Most teams should not build a CRM; they should configure one. A custom CRM makes sense when your workflow is the product, or when an industry-specific CRM is your startup.

Runs in your browser
No signup

1What are you building on?

Platform

Responsive web app

Design

A polished component library, lightly themed.

2Who builds it?

Team

One person, low overhead, slower calendar time

Blended hourly rate

$/ hour

A starting point. Type the rate from your actual quote.

3Pick the features

Your estimate: $17,200–$37,700.

Want a second opinion? Send it to me and I'll tell you which features I'd cut to ship weeks sooner.

Send me this estimate

What people forget to budget for

Data import

Customers arrive with messy spreadsheets and old CRMs. Import, de-duplication and mapping are essential and slow to get right.

Permissions

Who can see which deals and contacts gets complicated quickly in sales teams.

Email sync

Logging emails automatically means OAuth with mail providers and careful privacy handling.

How the estimate works

Each feature has a range of hours for a senior engineer building production-quality software. Those hours scale with the number of platforms, then the estimate adds what every real project needs on top of writing features.

build  = setup + design + Σ(feature hours × platform factor)
hours  = (build + 20% QA + PM overhead) × 1.15 contingency
cost   = hours × hourly rate
weeks  = hours ÷ productive hours per week

Ranges, not single numbers, because the honest answer depends on details nobody knows yet: how clean the third-party APIs are, how many design rounds you want, how often scope moves. If someone quotes a single number without asking those questions, the range is hiding in their change requests.

Building for web and mobile is not twice the work with React Native: the backend, business logic and much of the UI code are shared. That is why the platform factor for web plus mobile is about 1.5, not 2.

Worked example

Take a CRM MVP with 7 features (sign-up & login, teams, roles & workspaces, admin panel, email & push notifications, search & filters, dashboards & charts, third-party integrations (×2)), built by a senior freelancer at $60/hour:

Worked example
Line	Hours
Feature build (incl. setup and design)	192–420
QA, project management, contingency	95–208
Total	287–628

That comes to $17,200–$37,700 over roughly 10–21 weeks. Deferring teams, roles & workspaces alone would save about $4,310.

Hours by feature

The ranges the estimator uses, before platform factor and overhead. The features founders most often underestimate are payments, permissions and admin tooling: none of them are visible in a demo, and all of them are needed the week after launch.

Hours by feature
Feature	Covers	Hours
Sign-up & login	Email + Google/GitHub OAuth, password reset, sessions	16–32
Teams, roles & workspaces	Invites, permissions, multi-tenant data isolation	32–64
Admin panel	Manage users, content and orders without touching the DB	32–64
Email & push notifications	Transactional email, push, in-app, preferences	16–40
Search & filters	Full-text search, facets, sorting, pagination	16–40
Dashboards & charts	User-facing analytics, aggregates, exports	24–56
Third-party integrations (×2)	e.g. Slack, Google Calendar, HubSpot, Zapier	24–60

Questions founders actually ask

Is it cheaper to build a CRM or pay for one?

Paying is cheaper for internal use. Building makes sense when the CRM is the product you sell.

What is the minimum feature set for a CRM MVP?

Contacts, a pipeline view, notes and one integration your users already depend on.

Can AI make a CRM MVP stand out?

Yes: auto-logging, summarising calls and suggesting next steps are where new CRMs compete.

How accurate is this estimate?

For a well-scoped MVP, expect the real number to land inside the range, assuming scope stays put. The bigger risk is scope creep, not the estimate: every feature added mid-build costs more than it would have up front.

Why is this higher than the agency quotes I've seen?

Teaser quotes usually exclude QA, project management, revisions and a buffer for the unknown. This estimator includes all four, so it is closer to what you will actually pay.

Do AI coding tools make an MVP cheaper?

They speed up boilerplate, tests and UI scaffolding. They do not remove product decisions, integrations, edge cases or debugging in production, which is where most of the hours in this breakdown sit.

Estimate by product type

Or start from scratch with the full MVP cost estimator.

More from the workbench

02 · AI & LLMsLLM API Cost CalculatorYour monthly bill across Claude, GPT, Gemini and open models, side by side.03 · Money & fundraisingRunway & Burn CalculatorMonths of cash left, the date it hits zero, and whether you are default alive.04 · Money & fundraisingSaaS Metrics CalculatorsLTV, CAC, churn, NRR, burn multiple and more, each with the formula and benchmarks.

Fine print

Tools: on the house.
Engineer: by the hour.

Building it isn't free either, but it can be faster than you think. Send me the breakdown and I'll tell you what I'd ship first.

I'm Himanshu, an AI and full-stack engineer. I build MVPs, AI agents and the growth plumbing around them for early-stage startups.

Hire me →My projects