CRM: what to build it with and what it costs
A team keeps its contacts, companies and deals in one place, with a pipeline and a log of every call and email.
Sample PRD
- Contacts and companies
- Deals pipeline
- Activity log
- Email sync
- Team roles
What it needs
- Organisations / B2B teams: each customer company is its own workspace with roles
- Google sign-in: teams sign in with Google Workspace
- Postgres: relational data: contacts, companies and deals link to each other
- Transactional email: invites and notifications
- Error tracking (nice to have): know when sync breaks
MVP: about 100 users, $0/mo
Someone with an idea or a solo founder. Built with an AI app builder: describe it and it builds and hosts it.
| What | Pick | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| AI coding agent | Base44 Starter | $16 |
| Mailgun Free | $0 | |
| Payments | Stripe Standard (US cards) | $0 |
| Analytics & errors | Sentry Developer | $0 |
Growth: about 10,000 users, $10.94/mo
A funded team or one with traction. Built with an AI coding agent for each of about 3 developers.
- Daily backups: daily backups once real people depend on it
| What | Pick | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| AI coding agent | Augment Code Standard | $20 |
| Hosting | Fly.io Machine, shared-cpu-1x with 256MB RAM | $6.19 |
| Database | Neon Launch | $1.75 |
| Sign-in | Auth0 Free | $0 |
| Amazon SES A la carte | $3 | |
| Payments | Stripe Standard (US cards) | $0 |
| Analytics & errors | PostHog Free | $0 |
First cost jump: Auth0: listed plans end around here, so expect enterprise pricing (contact sales); costs from here are a lower bound on Free
Scale: about 100,000 users, $135.94/mo
An established product. Built with an AI coding agent with team billing and admin for about 10 developers.
- Daily backups: daily backups
- Point-in-time recovery: restore to any minute after a bad deploy
- Multi-factor authentication: two-factor sign-in for accounts worth stealing
- SOC 2 report available: customers' security reviews ask for a SOC 2 report
| What | Pick | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| AI coding agent | Augment Code Standard | $20 |
| Hosting | Fly.io Machine, shared-cpu-1x with 256MB RAM | $42.19 |
| Database | DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL Single node (1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM, 30 GiB disk) | $34.75 |
| Sign-in | WorkOS AuthKit | $0 |
| Amazon SES A la carte | $30 | |
| Payments | Stripe Standard (US cards) | $0 |
| Analytics & errors | Sentry Team | $29 |
First cost jump: DigitalOcean Managed PostgreSQL: Single node (1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM, 30 GiB disk) limits reached, upgrade to Single node (2 vCPU, 4 GiB RAM, 60 GiB disk)
What drives the cost
- Sign-in priced per active user, and SSO on enterprise tiers
- Database size as activity logs grow
- Email sync volume
Lock-in
Your schema and the sign-in provider's organisation model are the sticky parts; export both regularly.
Use this in Claude (with Kong Reviews connected at https://kongreviews.com/mcp)

