A custom CRM that fits your business. Not the other way around.

It depends heavily on the complexity of the build, but the comparison is more nuanced than it first appears. Salesforce starts at around £75 per user per month and scales quickly, particularly once you add the modules you actually need. For a 10-person team on a mid-tier plan, you are easily spending £15,000 to £20,000 per year before any customisation work, and that cost recurs every year indefinitely.

A CoreCRM deployment is a one-off development cost. Once built, you own it. There are no per-user licence fees, no annual price increases, and no features locked behind a higher tier. Depending on the complexity of your requirements, a CoreCRM project typically starts from around £8,000 to £12,000 for a well-specified mid-complexity build. For many businesses, the licence fees they would have paid in two to three years of Salesforce more than justify it.

We can give you a realistic cost estimate after a 30-minute call. We are not going to tell you custom CRM is always the right answer. If your requirements are genuinely simple, HubSpot's free tier might be fine. But if you need something tailored, the numbers usually stack up.

A typical CoreCRM deployment takes between 6 and 14 weeks from signed-off specification to go-live. The range is wide because the variables are wide: a CRM for a 5-person sales team with clean existing data and no integrations moves faster than a system for a 50-person operation that needs to connect to an ERP, pull data from a legacy platform, and migrate 10 years of records.

The discovery and specification phase, usually 2 to 4 weeks, is where most of the time is invested. Getting the specification right before building is the difference between a project that goes smoothly and one that drags on through scope changes. We are thorough at this stage precisely because it saves time later.

This is one of the most important questions to ask any CRM developer, and one of the clearest arguments for working with us over buying an off-the-shelf product. Because you own the code and we built it, we can change anything. There are no restrictions on what can be modified, no third-party platform constraints, and no waiting for a vendor to release a feature in a future update.

Most of our CRM clients are on a support and development retainer after go-live. Your business will change. Your CRM should change with it. We handle ongoing development through a retained hours model, which means you have a predictable cost and direct access to the developers who built the system.

Yes, and this is one of the strongest reasons to choose a custom CRM over an off-the-shelf alternative. Integration with your existing systems is built as part of the project, not bolted on via a third-party connector that breaks every time the other system updates.

We have built CoreCRM integrations with accounting platforms (Xero, Sage, FreeAgent), email marketing tools, ERP systems, warehouse management platforms, job management software, and a range of bespoke internal systems. If it has an API or a database, we can integrate with it. If it does not, we can often find another way.

The integrations we build are native to your CoreCRM instance, which means they are maintained by us and covered by your support agreement. You are not dependent on a marketplace connector built by a third party you have never heard of.

Yes, completely. The code we write for your CoreCRM deployment is yours. The data is yours. There is no licence agreement that requires you to keep paying us, and there is no vendor lock-in. If you decided you never wanted to speak to Dev Partners again after go-live, you would still own a fully functional CRM system.

In practice, most clients stay with us because they want ongoing development and support, and because we know the system inside out. But that is a commercial decision, not a contractual one. You are never trapped.

Yes. We handle data migration as part of every CoreCRM deployment. Salesforce and HubSpot both support data export, and we have migrated clients from both platforms into CoreCRM. The migration process includes mapping your existing data to the new system's structure, cleaning data where needed, and validating that nothing has been lost or misaligned before go-live.

The decision to migrate usually happens when the monthly licence cost has grown too high, when the system has become so customised that it no longer makes sense to stay on a generic platform, or when the business has grown in a direction that the original platform was never designed for. If you are in any of those situations, it is worth a conversation about whether migration makes sense.

The difference is time, cost, and proven reliability. Building a CRM from scratch means rebuilding all the infrastructure that CoreCRM already has: user authentication, session management, contact data structures, audit logging, role permissions, database architecture, and the dozens of other components that a functioning CRM requires before you have written a single business-specific feature.

With CoreCRM, that infrastructure already exists, has been running in production since 2011, and has been hardened through years of real-world use. Your project budget goes on building the features and workflows specific to your business, not on rebuilding solved problems.

The result is a faster, lower-cost project with a more reliable foundation than a from-scratch build could offer at the same price point.

CoreCRM is built on PHP with a MySQL database, running on standard LAMP stack infrastructure. This is a deliberate choice: PHP and MySQL are mature, widely understood, and straightforward to maintain and host. There is no dependency on niche frameworks or proprietary technology that creates risk down the line.

This also means that if you ever wanted another developer to work on the system, you would have no difficulty finding one. The code follows standard conventions, is documented, and does not require specialist knowledge to understand.

We host CoreCRM deployments on AWS infrastructure with Cloudflare in front of it for performance and security, but we can accommodate other hosting requirements if your business has specific constraints.

Possibly. It depends on whether your requirements have specific elements that off-the-shelf tools cannot handle. For a small business with a simple sales pipeline and standard contact management needs, HubSpot's free tier or Pipedrive at a low per-user cost might be entirely sufficient. We would tell you that honestly.

Custom CRM makes sense for smaller businesses when the nature of what they do is genuinely unusual, when they need CRM connected to other bespoke systems, or when they are growing fast and the cost of Salesforce at 20 users is going to hurt. The size of the business matters less than the complexity of the requirement.

The best way to find out is to describe your situation to us. We will tell you whether custom development makes sense or whether an off-the-shelf tool would serve you better. We would rather give you the honest answer than sell you a project you do not need.

Yes, and this is one of the areas where a custom build has the clearest advantage over off-the-shelf products. Different teams often have genuinely different requirements from a CRM, and generic platforms force a compromise. Your sales team needs pipeline visibility. Your account management team needs relationship history and renewal tracking. Your finance team wants invoice status and payment history. None of those needs are the same.

CoreCRM can be configured with role-based views so each team sees and works with the data that matters to them. Workflows can be team-specific. Reports can be built per department. And because it is all in one system, the data is shared without duplication or synchronisation issues.

We do, typically through a monthly support and development retainer. This covers bug fixes, security updates, hosting management, and ongoing development as your requirements evolve. The retainer is structured around hours, so you are not paying for support you do not use.

Because we built the system, we can diagnose and fix issues in minutes rather than hours. There is no learning curve, no reading through someone else's code. For most clients, the retainer pays for itself in reduced overhead compared to managing a Salesforce instance with a certified consultant.