First: do you need a CRM, or discipline?
The most common reason a CRM fails in a small company is not that the wrong one was chosen. It is that the real problem was different: nobody was recording what was discussed with the customer. A CRM does not create the habit of recording, it only makes it easier.
The test is simple. If today, in a spreadsheet or a notebook, your people record every conversation, a CRM will make them faster. If they record nothing, the CRM will be empty in three weeks and the money is wasted. In that second case, fix the process first: who records, what exactly, and when.
The second test: do you lose customers because you forget to follow up? If yes, you need a CRM and it pays for itself with the first recovered customer. If you sell once with no follow-up, the value is much smaller.
When off-the-shelf is enough
For most small companies, the right answer is a standard CRM. It costs €15–€60 per user per month, you start within days, and it already integrates with WhatsApp, telephony, email and website forms.
It is the right choice when: your sales process is linear (lead → contact → quote → contract); you have under about 8–10 users; you do not need your own calculations inside the CRM; and it does not have to talk automatically to an old internal system.
What to pick, briefly: Kommo and Bitrix24 are the most widespread in the region, with good WhatsApp and telephony integration. Pipedrive is the easiest to adopt for a small sales team. HubSpot has a generous free tier, but the price climbs steeply once you need the automation features.
Do not underestimate implementation cost: even a standard CRM needs 10–30 hours of configuration, data import and training. The companies that skip this are exactly the ones whose CRM stays empty.
The two situations where custom is worth it
1. The user arithmetic. At €35 per user per month with 12 users you pay €5040 a year, every year. A €4000 custom CRM pays for itself in under a year, and after that adding a new employee costs nothing. Below 6–8 users, the arithmetic almost never supports building.
2. The process that does not fit. This is the more interesting case, and more common than it seems. Real examples: a car workshop where each customer has vehicles and each vehicle has its own history of work and parts; a construction firm where the “customer” is really a site with stages, estimates and handovers; a bakery with recurring orders by day of week and delivery routes; a retailer whose price is calculated by configuration rather than by product.
In all of these, a standard CRM forces you to bend reality to fit its fields. It can be done — through custom fields and three integrations — but the result is fragile, slow, and understood only by whoever configured it. If that process is what differentiates you from competitors, it is not worth deforming to fit someone else's software.
What it costs and what is included, realistically
Standard CRM: €15–€60 per user per month, plus 10–30 hours of setup and training at the start (€300–€1200 if you pay for it). Live in 1–2 weeks.
Custom CRM: from €2000 for a sales system built on your process, €6000 for a complete one with inventory, invoicing and accounting integration, €1500 for dashboards and reporting over data you already hold. One-time cost, no per-user fee. Timeline: 6–12 weeks.
What always gets underestimated: migrating the old data, and training. A perfect system the team does not use is worth nothing. Budget 2–4 weeks running in parallel with the old record — it costs time, but it is the difference between adoption and abandonment.
A useful intermediate step: if you are between the two, start with a standard CRM and an AI agent that writes leads into it automatically from WhatsApp or your website. You solve the most expensive loss — enquiries that never reach the system at all — without building anything yet.
How to decide in five minutes
1. Do your people record what they discuss with customers today? If not, fix the process before buying anything.
2. How many users do you have, and how many in two years? Under 8, standard. Over 12, work out the two-year subscription and compare it with €4000.
3. Can you describe your process in four linear steps? If yes, standard. If step two involves “it depends”, branches, or entities that are not “customer” — custom is worth it.
4. Does it need to read from or write to another system of yours automatically? If that system has no API, standard will not manage it.
At ARTYONIX we build custom CRM and ERP systems from €2000, with the source code handed over and no per-user fee. But if your description makes clear that a well-configured Kommo is enough, we say so — it is a 20-minute conversation that saves you an investment you do not need.
What to remember
- A CRM does not create the habit of recording; if nobody records today, fix the process first.
- Under about 8 users with a linear process, a standard CRM is almost always the right answer.
- Above about 10–12 users, the subscription exceeds development cost within the first year.
- The second real reason to build: your process has entities that are not “customer”.
- Data migration and training are consistently underestimated and decide whether the system gets used.
- A good intermediate step: a standard CRM plus an AI agent writing leads into it automatically.