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Custom CRM development
Contacts, a pipeline with your own stages, proposals, contracts and invoices, all linked: we build the CRM your sales cycle calls for. Indicative budget we publish: €20,000 to €80,000. Free, capped quote with a reply within 24 hours; source code handed over on delivery, once the project is paid.
Custom CRM
A custom CRM is customer relationship management software built for one company: its sales stages, its fields, its documents and its rules. OTTOPILOTE, a remote studio working in the United States, France and the rest of Europe, builds it for small and mid-sized businesses whose off-the-shelf CRM no longer fits, from importing the contacts to sending the invoice.
When your team works around the tool: exports to a spreadsheet, fields used for something else, proposals built elsewhere, amounts re-typed into billing. If a setting in your current CRM fixes it, keep it: that costs less than a build.
The deal, the proposal, the contract and the invoices live in the same tool. The signed amount is never typed twice, and a discount follows the document all the way to the last invoice.
The source code, the accounts and the documentation, handed over on delivery, once the project is paid. No per-seat license to pay a vendor: what remains is hosting and the support you choose.
€20k–€80k
the indicative budget we publish for a custom CRM, depending on scope.
OTTOPILOTE custom software guide, 2026
The limits.
Each one can be checked within a week, without a consultant. And each one calls for a different fix: a setting in your current tool, an add-on module, or a custom CRM.
Every week, someone exports the CRM to rebuild forecasts, margins or commissions on the side.
Count a month’s exports, and note what each file calculates that the CRM doesn’t.
If it’s a dashboard, a setting or a module will do. If it’s a rule of your own (commission, margin, weighted forecast), that rule is what needs building.
The deal is in the CRM, but the proposal is written in Word or Google Docs and the amount is copied over by hand.
Take three closed deals: is the amount the same in the CRM, on the proposal and on the invoice?
Link the deal, the proposal, the contract and the invoices. Those hand-offs are where errors creep in: we learned this on our own CRM.
See the two errors“Custom field 7” holds the referrer’s name, a pipeline stage doubles as a reminder, and half the fields stay empty.
List the fields nobody fills in, and the ones that hold something other than what their name says.
A cleanup of the configuration is often enough. When it’s the structure that doesn’t fit (several companies, several pipelines), it has to be rebuilt.
Payment schedules, subscriptions and discounts are recalculated by hand in the billing tool.
Measure the time spent each month re-typing what is already in the CRM.
A connector is enough if your billing tool has an API and your rules are standard. Otherwise, it’s the link between the sale and the invoice that needs building.
When the rules are yoursThe subscription is priced per user, the module you’re missing sits in the higher tier, and part of the team almost never opens the tool.
Add up licenses, add-ons and workaround time over three to five years, and compare that with a build plus its hosting and support.
It’s the total cost over time that decides, not the entry price. Our cost guide publishes the ranges to compare against.
See the cost rangesOur takeA single sign can often be fixed in your current CRM. When signs 02 and 04 show up together, it’s no longer a setting: it’s the link between sales and billing, and that is what a custom CRM brings.
What we build.
An off-the-shelf CRM often stops at the closed deal. Yours can run all the way to the payment, without an amount ever being typed twice. Around that thread: roles and permissions, tasks and reminders, connections to your email, calendar and billing tools through their APIs, and documents in your branding.
Method
Six to eight weeks is the timeline we publish for a management tool: the first phase of a CRM is cut to fit it. The next phases start from how your salespeople actually use it.
01W1
The stages your deals actually go through, the fields that actually get filled in, the documents produced, who approves what. We start from a full export of your current CRM: it shows what the tool holds, not what people think goes into it.
02W2
The record, the pipeline and the proposal designed with your salespeople, not just with management. A CRM the team doesn’t use is useless.
03W3 → W6
Contacts, companies, a pipeline with your stages and the data import come first. We show you progress every Friday, so you judge working screens, not promises.
04W7
Once the data is in, we replay a few closed deals: same amounts, same stages, same documents as before. Gaps get fixed before go-live.
05W8 →
Go-live and thirty days of fixes. Proposals, contracts, invoices and connections to your tools follow, phase by phase.
The proof.
Before Cockpit, our management tool, we ran several companies on Notion, Excel, a CRM and a billing tool: scattered data, double entry, and a manual export for every figure.
Development of Cockpit started on June 4, 2026; the next day, June 5, the CRM became its first business module. Since June 2026, Cockpit has replaced those four tools: a proposal becomes a contract, then invoices and payment schedules.
A proposal can be invoiced in several installments. Split the proposal into two invoices, and a $1,500 discount on the one-time fees would have been applied to each.
FixedChecked: the invoice that carries half of the one-time fees gets a $750 discount, not $1,500.
A month-to-month subscription proposal at €300/month. The document displayed it as if the client were committing for a full year.
FixedBefore: twelve monthly payments the client had not committed to. After: the price as sold, €300/month.
A vendor’s sales demo doesn’t show these cases: they appear when the CRM produces the documents that commit you. A third error was caught by checking a rendered contract, not by re-reading the code: the first version of our contracts printed the discount but left the “Total contract value” unchanged, and on a contract, the total is what counts. Cockpit is presented on our Missions page.
Price and timeline
The figures we publish before we’ve even talked. The CRM range covers your contacts, deals and follow-ups, tracked at your own stages; within it, the price follows your rules, your roles and your connections, and there is no per-seat license to pay afterwards. Your free, capped quote is then built around your sales cycle.
Custom CRM budget
€20,000–€80,000
First phase in production
6–8 weeks
After delivery
30 days
Range: “The Complete Guide to Custom Software Development in 2026”, indicative budgets, not a fixed price. Timeline and guarantees: Pricing page. Free, capped quote, reply within 24 hours.
The risks.
They don’t go away with a promise: only with what is written into the contract and what you can check during the project.
The code stays with them, or in a tool nobody else can take over: every change goes through them, at the price they set.
The scope grows along the way, every “small” request adds up, and the final bill has little to do with the estimate.
The tool was designed for management, not for the people who do the data entry: salespeople go back to their spreadsheet, and the CRM goes stale.
And the proof?The one we publish is our own CRM, above: what it replaced, and the errors we fixed in it.
Frequently asked questions
Another question? Write to us: a human reply within one business day.
We publish a range of €20,000 to €80,000 for a custom CRM, in our guide to custom software development: your contacts, deals and follow-ups, tracked at your own stages rather than a vendor’s. There is no per-seat license to pay afterwards. What moves a project up the range: the documents the CRM must produce (proposals, contracts, invoices); the roles and approvals (one user profile costs less than approvals that depend on the amount or the client); the connections to your tools (a CRM that stands alone costs less than one that reads and feeds three tools or more); and the import of your data (starting fresh costs less than years of history spread across several spreadsheets). Several sites and a heavy load put a project in ERP territory, which our guide puts at €50,000 to €250,000 and up. It is not a fixed price: the quote is free and capped, with a reply within 24 hours.
The timeline we publish for a management tool is six to eight weeks: that is the size of a CRM’s first phase (contacts, pipeline, data import). Proposals, invoices and connections follow in later phases, planned from real use. If we’re running late, we absorb the extra days.
Yes, starting from a full export of your current tool: contacts, companies, deals, history. We clean up duplicates, decide field by field where each piece of information goes, then replay a few closed deals to compare. What comes over and what stays behind is decided with you.
Not necessarily. If what’s missing is a calculation or a document, we can build that module alone and connect it to your CRM through its API, when it has one. Replacing the CRM makes sense when the model itself doesn’t fit: several companies, several pipelines, or a sale the tool can’t link to billing.
You do, once the project is paid in full. Under US copyright law, software built by an outside firm doesn’t automatically belong to the client: a commissioned work is a “work made for hire” only if it falls into one of nine categories listed in the Copyright Act and both parties sign an agreement saying so (U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 30). Software is not on that list. Outside it, ownership moves to the client only through a written transfer signed by the owner of the rights (17 U.S.C. § 204(a)). That is why the assignment of rights is written into our contract: our Terms provide that the rights to the final deliverables transfer to you after full payment, while our know-how and the pre-existing or generic tools and components we reuse stay ours. Source code, accounts and documentation are handed over on delivery, once the project is paid.
Thirty days of fixes are included. After that, two options: a monthly support plan, quoted, or we train your team and hand everything over cleanly: source code, accounts and documentation, once the project is paid.
Further reading
Definition, limits and 2026 price ranges, including the one for a custom CRM.
When the CRM calculates discounts, schedules or commissions, it becomes business software: here is how we build it.
Test plan, test cases, sign-off and go/no-go: the full sequence before a business tool goes live.
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A few lines on your sales cycle are enough. Free, capped quote; source code handed over on delivery, once the project is paid.
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