What a CRM Really Costs Small Business in 2026

The owner of a six-stylist salon believes a CRM costs 990 roubles a month — that is what the landing page said. Six months later he is paying 14,000: five licences instead of one, an inventory module, a telephony integration, an outsourced consultant, and SMS billed separately. The mistake was not that the subscription got more expensive. It was that only one line out of five made it into the original calculation.

What the budget is actually made of

A CRM should be costed not by its plan price but by total cost of ownership over the first year. For a small business with 5–20 users, that usually breaks into five parts, and the subscription rarely accounts for more than half.

Five cost lines

• Licences: 500–2,500 roubles per user per month. For ten people that is 60,000–300,000 roubles a year.
• Rollout and pipeline configuration: 40,000–250,000 roubles one-off, depending on how many non-standard processes you have.
• Integrations: website, telephony, messengers, 1C, payment processing. Each one costs 15,000 to 80,000 roubles if it is not included out of the box.
• Training and support: 10,000–30,000 roubles a month for the first six months, while staff break the logic and ask questions.
• Custom work: whatever turned out to be missing. This line is unpredictable, and it is the one that most often gets out of hand.

Where saving money makes sense

The first honest saving is dropping licences for people who do not actually work in the system. Your accountant and your courier do not need a CRM; an export is enough for them. The second is starting with one pipeline rather than seven. Sales can go live in two weeks, while procurement, service and complaints get connected later, once the first part is already producing data. The third is not buying modules for future growth: within a year half of them will never have been opened, yet you are billed for them every month. If you are still deciding on a direction, it helps to talk to people who have implemented similar processes. We discuss this kind of task free of charge in an initial consultation, and the conclusion is often "you do not need a CRM yet, you need a decent way of tracking enquiries".

Where you must not cut corners

The dangerous saving is on data migration. Having your sales team retype the database by hand is cheaper than hiring a contractor right up until you discover the duplicates, the lost phone numbers and the agreements nobody wrote down. The second weak point is the website integration. An enquiry a manager copies out of email by hand goes missing in 10–15 percent of cases, and with an average order value of 30,000 roubles that is tens of thousands a month. We covered how this works technically in our piece on integrating a website with a CRM. The third is access rights. A salesperson who can export the entire database before resigning costs the business more than any subscription; the basic principles of access control are set out in the OWASP Top 10, and any contractor is expected to know them.

When off-the-shelf stops being cheap

There is a point past which a subscription loses to custom development. Usually that is 25–30 users, or three or four customisations that the off-the-shelf product cannot accommodate. At 30 licences of 1,500 roubles you pay 540,000 roubles a year purely for the right to log in, and over three years that is one and a half million without a single line written for your process. For cases like this we build a CRM around a specific business — more expensive at the start, cheaper over the distance. The middle option is an industry-specific product: homade, for example, covers beauty salons and Auto555 covers car rental, and in both cases half the configuration has already been done for you.

A simple way to sanity-check the numbers

Take the contractor's proposal and multiply everything monthly by 36. Add the one-off rollout, then add 20 percent for the custom work you cannot see yet. If the resulting figure frightens you, and the business earns less than that number in a quarter, a CRM is premature. Start by automating a single bottleneck and build the system when the flow of enquiries no longer fits in your head.