CRM and sales decision
Followup CRM
A competent technical user can build a useful construction CRM replacement (contacts, bids, pipeline, email capture, proposals) in a few weeks and run it; complete enterprise polish, SSO, and vendor onboarding are the main things you give up.
Visit website↗$99/mo
$1,188/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off56 h to build
$150/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Followup CRM alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Capture leads and contacts, log bids/opportunities, move deals through a pipeline, send/track follow-up emails, and view simple dashboards/reporting.
What it still won’t have
- Guided onboarding, paid data migration & team training offered by vendor
- Enterprise features out of the box (SSO, multi-entity reporting, enterprise SSO)
- Vendor support, SLAs, and 30-day money-back guarantee
- Polished integrations and any proprietary AI/voice features not reimplemented
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 2 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a self-hosted construction CRM using Laravel + Postgres and a React front end. Implement: user auth and role-based access (per-seat metadata), contacts/companies/leads/bids schema, pipeline UI to move deals across configurable stages, inbound email capture via IMAP (link messages to contacts/opportunities), a simple templated proposal-to-PDF generator, and dashboard aggregations (pipeline by stage, close rate, bid counts). Out of scope: multi-entity SaaS billing, enterprise SSO, and large-scale multi-tenant isolation. Include error handling, input validation, CI tests for API endpoints, and Docker deployment manifests for a single VPS.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score63
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productFollowUp CRM — product
- official pricingFollowUp CRM — pricing
- official docsFollowUp CRM — features
- open sourcekrayin/laravel-crm
- open sourceDolibarr/dolibarr
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
