# What A Custom CRM Actually Costs In Alberta > Real ranges, what moves the number, what is usually excluded, and the questions that stop a quote turning into a surprise. Written for owners who have never bought software before. *By AltaPro AI Team · Published 2026-08-01 · Updated 2026-08-05 · 7 min read · Category: Pricing* Software pricing is deliberately vague almost everywhere you look, which makes it very hard to tell whether a quote is fair. This is an attempt to be straight about what drives the number, what tends to be left out, and how to compare two proposals that look nothing alike. It is written for owners buying this for the first time, because that is who gets caught out. ## What Actually Drives The Price Four things move the number more than anything else, and none of them is the number of screens. The first is how many distinct stages your work moves through, because each one is logic that has to be built and tested. The second is money handling — quotes, invoices and payments carry rules, edge cases and consequences when they are wrong, so anything touching a dollar costs more than anything that does not. The third is integrations: every system you need it to talk to is a moving part maintained by somebody else. The fourth is whether people use it in the field, because a phone in a work glove in bad weather is a genuinely harder problem than a desktop in an office. - Number of distinct stages in your process - Whether it handles money, and how much of it - How many other systems it must talk to - Whether crews use it on a phone, on site ## What Is Usually Not In The Number This is where surprises live. Ask about each of these explicitly, because their absence is rarely dishonest — it is just assumed. Data migration from your current systems is often quoted separately, and its cost depends almost entirely on how tidy your existing data is. Training and the first few weeks of hand-holding may or may not be included. Hosting and third-party service fees are ongoing and are yours. And support after go-live is the big one: find out what is covered, for how long, and what happens after that period ends. ## Rough Shapes, Honestly Caveated Any range published without knowing your business is close to meaningless, so treat these as shapes rather than quotes. A tightly scoped tool that does one job well — a quoting calculator, a job tracker for a small crew — is a different order of magnitude from a system that runs your whole operation and talks to your accounting package. The more useful framing is comparative. Work out what you currently pay in subscriptions over three years, add the cost of the hours your team spends bridging the gaps between those tools, and you have the number any build has to beat. For a lot of businesses that comparison lands somewhere uncomfortable, because the hours turn out to dwarf the subscriptions. For plenty of others it says clearly that off-the-shelf is the right answer, which is a perfectly good outcome and cheaper than finding out later. ## How To Compare Two Proposals Two quotes for custom software are almost never comparing the same thing, which is why the cheaper one is not reliably the cheaper one. Put them side by side on specifics rather than totals. What exactly is delivered, stage by stage. Who owns the source code. What year two costs in total, including hosting and support. What happens when you need a change in month eight — is that a rate, a retainer, or a conversation nobody has had? And ask both to show you something they built three years ago that is still running. That last question filters more effectively than any of the others. ## The Payment Structure Matters As Much Staged payments tied to delivery protect both sides. Something at signing, something when it is handed over for you to test on real work, and something at go-live is a reasonable and common shape. Be wary of paying the majority upfront, and be equally wary of a price that seems too low for the scope described — that usually means the scope is not really understood yet, and the gap surfaces later as change requests. A slightly higher quote from someone who has clearly thought about the awkward parts of your business is generally the cheaper option in the end. ## When The Answer Is Not To Buy Anything Sometimes the honest recommendation is to fix the process first. If nobody can describe how a job moves through the business without disagreeing, no software will resolve that — it will encode the disagreement. Writing down your stages, deciding who approves what, and getting your pricing out of one person's head costs nothing and often removes half the pain on its own. It also makes any software you subsequently buy or build dramatically more likely to fit, which is the cheapest insurance available. ## FAQ ### Why Won't Anyone Give A Price On The Phone? Because the honest range before scoping is so wide it is useless, and a number given too early tends to become an anchor that neither side can move off. What you should expect early is a clear explanation of what drives the price and a fixed cost for the scoping work itself. ### What Should Year Two Cost? Ask for it as a specific figure rather than a percentage. It should cover hosting, third-party services, support and a defined amount of change work. If nobody will put a number on year two, that is worth more attention than the build price. ### Is There A Cheaper Way To Start? Yes — build the narrowest thing that removes your worst bottleneck, use it for a season, and expand from what you learn. It costs less, it proves the fit before you commit, and the version you build second is always better than the one you would have built first. --- Source: https://altaproai.ca/blog/what-a-custom-crm-costs-alberta · AltaPro AI (read "Alberta Professional AI"), an Edmonton custom CRM and operations software company. Free 30-minute call: https://altaproai.ca/#audit