The cost of developing vs buying a CRM product

The cost of developing vs buying a CRM product

We are a small start-up company. We provide complete technology solutions for businesses in the NJ/NY area. We are interested in purchasing a CRM product or hiring someone to create one. We haven't done a lot of research yet as far as the costs. I know there are a lot of variables involved but we were wondering if you could provide us with a range of costs that a CRM product could cost for a small company. I should mention that it would be a front end using Access or Visual Basic and a backend of SQL Server 7.0.

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Hello Ted,

Three years ago, we developed a CRM product focused on the telecom industry. The technology used was Oracle Develop/2000 on the front-end and Oracle8 RDBMS on the back end, on a Sun Solaris/Unix platform. We are releasing version 3.0 next month. The cost of development was $700,000 to $1.5M plus hardware/software.

Three developers, one DBA and one Unix Administrator participated in the project.

It took six to eight months to develop the first version, six months to develop version 2.0, and three months for version 3.0.

The cost of development using Microsoft Visual Basic and a back end using SQL Server 7.0 was about $200,000 for a base number of users.

The cost of buying a CRM product with a base technology platform and scalablilty to Microsoft technology for a base number of users would be $100,000 to $500,000,000.

Small - Med Market [5 - 200 users]
Unix/Oracle Technology base number of users is 500,000 to 2,000,000
Large Enterprise [200 - 2000 users]

For more information about costs associated with CRM products or development, check out searchCRM's Best Web Link category Intro to Implementing CRM.


This was first published in June 2004

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