Stop Paying for Seats: Why We Built Our CRM on Serverless
If you run a team, you probably know this bill. Most popular CRMs charge per user, per month, and the plans with the features that your team actually need usually cost the most:
| CRM | Entry plan | The plan most teams grow into |
|---|---|---|
| HubSpot Sales Hub | Starter, $15 | Professional, $90 (plus a $1,500 onboarding fee) |
| Salesforce Sales Cloud | Starter Suite, £20 | Pro Suite, £80 |
| Pipedrive | Lite, $14 | Growth, $39 |
| Zoho CRM | Standard, $14 | Enterprise, $40 |
Per user, per month, billed annually, as published by each vendor in September 2026. Paying month to month costs more. Prices change often, so follow the links for current prices in your currency.
Each price looks small until you do the maths. At a middle-of-the-road £40 per user, a team of 10 costs £400 a month, or £4,800 a year. That's before add-ons, and before the price rise at renewal. You also pay for every seat whether that person logs in daily or twice a quarter.
We wanted to know whether that model still makes sense. For a lot of small and mid-sized businesses, we don't think it does.
Pay for what you use, not who you employ
Most CRMs are priced per seat because of how they're built. Servers run around the clock and the vendor needs predictable income to cover them, so you pay for capacity whether you use it or not.
A 'serverless' approach works differently. Nothing runs until someone does something. When a colleague opens a contact record, the cloud provider runs a tiny piece of code for a fraction of a second, charges a fraction of a penny, and stops. When nobody is working, the bill drops to almost nothing.
So your costs follow how much your team uses the system, not how many people are on the payroll. For most small businesses that's far less than the per-seat price suggests.
What it looks like in practice
We built our CRM entirely on managed services from Amazon Web Services (AWS). These are the same building blocks used by companies much bigger than ours:
- AWS Lambda: runs the business logic only when it's needed.
- Amazon API Gateway: the secure front door for every request.
- Amazon DynamoDB: a fast, fully managed database that bills per request, with automatic backups.
- Amazon Cognito: sign-in, including "Sign in with Google".
- Amazon S3 & CloudFront: store documents and serve the app quickly, wherever your team is.
- Amazon SES: sends system email such as team invitations.
- AWS KMS: encrypts sensitive data like connected email credentials.
- Amazon EventBridge: runs scheduled jobs, such as syncing email in the background.
- Amazon CloudWatch: monitoring and alerts, so problems are caught before you notice them.
There are no servers to patch and no machines sitting idle overnight. Capacity scales up on a busy Monday morning and back down afterwards, automatically.
The numbers, roughly
Every business is different, so treat this as an illustration rather than a quote:
| Typical per-seat CRM | Serverless | |
|---|---|---|
| 10 users | ~£400/month | Usually tens of pounds a month in cloud costs |
| Add 5 more users | +£200/month | Often barely changes |
| Quiet month | Same bill | Lower bill |
The hosting cost is usually the smallest part of the total. What matters more is that adding people no longer means an automatic price jump.
It isn't just about cost
- Built around how you work. You don't need to bend your process to fit someone else's product, or pay for features you'll never use.
- Your data, your control. Point-in-time backups, encryption, and strict separation between businesses come as standard.
- Enterprise-grade foundations. The same infrastructure behind household-name apps, without the enterprise price tag.
Is it right for you?
Serverless won't suit everyone. If you need a huge marketplace of plug-ins on day one, a big off-the-shelf CRM may still be the better choice. But if you're a team of roughly 4 to 20 people, paying for seats that don't earn their keep, it's worth a conversation.
Let's talk
Curious what this could look like for your business, or what you could save? Get in touch. We're happy to look at what you pay today and give you an honest view, with no hard sell.