£420,000. That's What Salesforce Was Going to Cost. We Replaced It in 6 Weeks.

The client was running Salesforce with 340 licences — 90 of which were active users. The rest were ghost accounts, auto-renewed year after year. 14 custom objects sat unused, built by a consultant three years earlier for requirements that had since changed. Three external consultants were on retainer just to manage the implementation. The annual cost was tracking toward £420,000 over three years — for a CRM the sales team had worked around rather than with.

Full audit of the Salesforce estate: active users, workflows, integrations, and data dependencies. Mapped exactly what the business needed versus what it had been paying for. Built a custom CRM on Next.js, TypeScript, and Supabase — designed around their real sales process, not Salesforce's assumptions about it. Lead pipeline management, email integration, custom reporting dashboard, mobile-responsive interface. Migrated 15,000 contacts and four years of deal history. Delivered in 6 weeks. Total build cost: £38,000.

Year 1 saving: £102,000. Three-year cumulative saving: £420,000. Consultant retainers eliminated on day one. Sales team adoption hit 100% within two weeks — compared to 60% Salesforce usage before. Lead response time improved by 40%. The business owns the system outright with no vendor to negotiate with at renewal.