Most companies should buy. A small minority should build. Here’s how to tell which side of the line you sit on.
At https://irpr.io we get this question once a quarter from a founder or CRO who’s been told by their consultant to “just customise Salesforce.” Usually that’s the right answer. Sometimes, about 1 in 12, it isn’t, and the team that builds custom outperforms the team that doesn’t by a clear margin.
Buy Salesforce when: you have a standard B2B sales motion, your team has been on Salesforce before, your reporting needs are conventional, and you’re optimising for “rep-ready in 30 days.” Salesforce is bought by 150,000 companies because their motion fits 80% of B2B sales. You probably fit the 80%.
Buy HubSpot when: you’re under 50 sales/marketing seats, you want CRM and marketing on one platform, and your team’s average technical skill is moderate. HubSpot’s defaults are kinder than Salesforce’s, but the customisation ceiling is lower.
Build custom when: your sales motion is genuinely non-standard (auction-based, marketplace, multi-party), your data model breaks SaaS assumptions (e.g., multi-tier inventory, regulated workflows), or you’re operating at a scale where the per-seat cost of an off-the-shelf CRM exceeds your cost of building and maintaining a focused custom one.
The sign you should build is rarely “Salesforce isn’t powerful enough.” It’s almost always “Salesforce assumes a sales motion we don’t have, and our team spends more time fighting the assumption than selling.”
If that pattern is showing up in your weekly stand-ups, it’s worth running the build-vs-buy maths. We’ve shipped custom CRMs for marketplace operators, regulated lenders, and a couple of B2B platforms where the SaaS option genuinely didn’t fit.
The full https://irpr.io/services/saas-mvp-development we run is the same one we’d apply to a custom CRM build. Most don’t need it. The ones that do, do.
About IRPR.io
IRPR.io is a global software studio that takes products from Idea to Release. With senior engineers across 50+ countries, the studio designs, builds, and ships custom web applications, mobile apps, SaaS platforms, AI products, and cloud infrastructure for startups, scale-ups, and enterprise teams. Every engagement runs through the proprietary IRPR framework, Idea → Roadmap → Product → Release, with fixed-price commitments and senior-only execution from kickoff to handoff. IRPR.io is the technology arm of https://irpr.agency, a full-service marketing, PR, video, and technology partner. Learn more at https://irpr.io.
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