What does a CRM system cost?
The licence price is the only amount on the vendor's website. It is rarely the largest one. These are the four cost items, with list prices from September 2026 and two worked examples.
The four cost items
Every CRM system has the same four items, whether you choose Pipedrive, HubSpot, Salesforce or a system of your own:
The first item gets talked about most and the last one least. In practice, the last one decides after a year whether the system is still in use or the team is back in Excel.
Licences: the list prices
These are the published prices of the three packages we see most often in SMEs, next to our own subscription for a custom CRM.
| System | Entry | Mid tier | Top tier | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Pipedrive | €14 (Lite) | €59 (Premium) | €79 (Ultimate) | Add-ons for leads, projects, campaigns and documents: €13 to €41 per month extra |
 HubSpot Sales Hub | Free up to 2 users; Starter €7 to €20 | €90 (Professional) | €150 (Enterprise) | One-off onboarding: €1,470 (Professional), €3,420 (Enterprise) |
 Salesforce Sales Cloud | €25 (Starter Suite) | €175 to €195 (Enterprise, now called Core) | €350 to €550 | Billed annually; a portal for clients or partners needs separate licences |
 Custom CRM (CRM Force) | €200 per month, including the first user | €75 per additional user | No tiers | No setup costs, 12-month term; portal users €20 per bundle of 20 |
List prices per user per month, excluding VAT, billed annually. Checked on 29 September 2026 on the pricing pages of Pipedrive, HubSpot (euro prices) and Salesforce. Negotiated prices are often lower, especially at Salesforce.
Mind the jump between tiers. At Pipedrive and HubSpot, what a growing team needs, such as automation, permissions per role and reporting, almost always sits in the mid tier. At Salesforce the same goes for Enterprise. So do not calculate with the entry price, because hardly anyone stays there.
Setup: the item that never appears on the pricing page
Pipedrive and the entry versions of HubSpot you set up yourself. Count on a few days of your own time, and a few weeks before everyone actually uses it.
HubSpot Professional charges a mandatory onboarding of €1,470. In practice a partner is added for 40 to 100 hours, so €4,000 to €12,000, if you want workflows, reporting and a data migration.
Salesforce has the widest spread. A quick start with standard objects and no migration is roughly 120 hours; an SME setup with data migration, two integrations and training sits around 300 to 400 hours, at €75 to €185 per hour. That is €25,000 to €70,000. Having custom objects, automation and a portal built means a developer for four to six months, €60,000 to well over €90,000. What a Salesforce consultant costs and how to set up that project is on our consultancy page.
That spread comes from scope. "Setting up a CRM" can differ tenfold in size. Whoever has the process on a single page beforehand pays the lower end of the range.
Integrations and portals
Email and calendar come with every package. An accounting link (SnelStart, Exact, Moneybird) runs through a connector of €20 to €100 per month, or through custom work if the standard connector does not do what you need. Website forms are free up to a few hundred euros, depending on what has to happen with the lead.
The big difference is the portal: clients, dealers or partners who log in themselves and see their own data. At Pipedrive and HubSpot that does not exist, or only through extra tooling. At Salesforce it is called Experience Cloud and you pay per login. With a custom CRM the portal is part of the base, at €1 per portal user per month in bundles of 20. A hundred clients looking in then cost €100 per month.
Management and ongoing development
After go-live it only starts. A product is added, a step in the process disappears, management wants a different report. With a package you need an administrator of your own (part of an FTE) or a partner on call at €100 to €185 per hour.
Rule of thumb from our practice: four hours a week of management on a Salesforce environment is almost €20,000 a year. With smaller packages it is less, but rarely zero. With a custom subscription, ongoing development is part of the monthly amount and you submit requests from inside the system.
Work out your own situation
Enter your own numbers, requirements and assumptions below. Amounts over one, three or five years, everything together; the sources and the check date are under the module.
Work out your own situation
Four routes side by side on your numbers and requirements. Licences at list price, add-ons counted where a requirement calls for one, setup and management on assumptions you can adjust yourself. All amounts exclude VAT.
Tick what you need. A route that cannot do it is ruled out, even if it is the cheapest.
Fields, permissions, migration, two integrations and training: 16 hours (Pipedrive), 40 hours (HubSpot), 320 hours (Salesforce, one developer for two months).
Adjust assumptions
The presets above fill these sliders. Adjust them yourself if you have a quote to compare with.
Together 320 hours, at 160 hours per developer per month.
On these assumptions Pipedrive Premium is the lowest: €17,495 over 3 years.
Tick above what the system must be able to do; then you also see which routes drop out.
| Cost item |  Pipedrive Premium |  HubSpot Sales Hub Pro |  Salesforce Enterprise |  Custom CRM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Licences or subscription | €10,620 | €16,200 | €31,500 | €18,000including build, hosting, management and ongoing development |
| Setup, one-off | €2,00016 hours, onboarding €0 | €6,47040 hours, onboarding €1,470 | €40,000320 hours, onboarding €0 | included |
| Management and ongoing development | €4,875 | €9,750 | €19,500 | included |
| Portal | – | – | – | – |
| Add-ons for your requirements | – | – | – | – |
| Total over 3 years | €17,495 | €32,420 | €91,000 | €18,000 |
| Meets your requirements | – | – | – | – |
Sources and assumptions
- Pipedrive, prijspagina Nederland (checked on 29 September 2026): Premium, €59 per user per month billed annually. Add-ons (leads, projects, campaigns, documents, €13 to €41 per month) not counted.
- HubSpot Sales Hub, prijspagina (europrijzen) (checked on 29 September 2026): Sales Hub Professional, €90 per seat per month billed annually, plus a one-off onboarding of €1,470. Euro prices from the German pricing page; the Dutch page shows dollars.
- Salesforce Sales Cloud, prijspagina Nederland (checked on 3 August 2026): Sales Cloud Enterprise, €175 per user per month, billed annually. Salesforce now calls this edition Core (€195). A portal (Experience Cloud) has its own licences and is not counted.
- CRM Force, CRM op maat als abonnement (checked on 29 September 2026): €200 per month including the first user, €75 per additional user, portal users €1 per month in bundles of 20. Minimum term 12 months.
- Hours and hourly rate are rough estimates, not vendor figures. The presets are based on implementation lead times published by implementation partners in September 2026 (Salesforce: 6 to 12 weeks for 10 to 75 users, quick starts 2 to 4 weeks; HubSpot Professional: 4 to 6 weeks with a partner; Pipedrive: 1 to 4 weeks) and on CRM Force's own practice. Salesforce counts developers × months × 160 hours, like the calculator on the product page. The management slider is calibrated on Salesforce; for HubSpot we count half of those hours externally and for Pipedrive a quarter. Adjust everything to your own quote.
- Fit per requirement is assessed on the functionality of the named tiers in September 2026: portal and custom objects are missing in Pipedrive and in HubSpot Sales Hub Professional (custom objects are in HubSpot Enterprise); mailings run through Marketing Hub at HubSpot and Marketing Cloud at Salesforce, both priced separately. Accounting connector assumed at €40 per month (market price €20 to €100).
List prices; negotiated prices are often lower, especially at Salesforce. Your own team's time is not counted. CRM Force builds custom CRM systems itself and implements Salesforce.
At five users the custom subscription is cheaper than HubSpot Professional and Salesforce, and more expensive than Pipedrive as long as you set up Pipedrive yourself and your process fits in it. At fifteen users Pipedrive still comes out lower. The difference is then what you pay for a system that follows your process instead of the other way round.
At thirty or more users with a standard process a package almost always wins, because the build is shared with all the vendor's other customers. When which route fits is in CRM implementation: standard or custom.
What you can do beforehand to pay less
Five questions determine more of the amount than the choice of vendor:
- ✓Is the process on a single page, from first contact to invoice?
- ✓How many people really log in? Do not count everyone who "has a look now and then".
- ✓Which integrations are needed on day one, and which only in a year?
- ✓Do clients or partners need to look in?
- ✓Who will own the system?
Whoever brings these five answers to a conversation gets a quote that is right, from whichever vendor.
In short
A CRM system costs between €14 and well over €500 per user per month in licences, and with packages setup and management come on top, which over three years often exceed the licences themselves. A custom subscription turns that around: one amount per month with everything in it, and a limit at large teams with a standard process. Work out both routes over three years before you choose.
Prices checked on 29 September 2026, excluding VAT. CRM Force builds custom CRM systems itself and implements Salesforce; we have no commercial relationship with Pipedrive or HubSpot.
Want to know what a CRM costs in your situation?
In a half-hour conversation we work out both routes, standard package and custom, based on your own numbers.