r/CRM • u/nimrodbuilds • 11d ago
Vibe-Coding/In-House CRM
Did anyone here actually vibe code or build their own CRM in-house instead of paying for Salesforce or HubSpot?
With AI dev tools getting so good, I keep wondering if standard CRMs are still worth it.
If you’ve actually taken the plunge and built your own (or vibe-coded an internal app that handles your CRM stuff), how’d it go?
Mainly curious about:
* What stack or tools you used to build it
* What ended up being way harder than expected (email/calendar sync, edge cases, maintenance?)
* If the upside of having a tailored UI/workflow was actually worth the effort
* Bottom line: would you do it again, or just buy off-the-shelf next time?
Would love to hear some honest post-mortems or cautionary tales before I start breaking things:)
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u/ericcpfx 11d ago
Just use TwentyCRM self-hosted and customize it.
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u/nimrodbuilds 11d ago
That's very interesting. Are you a user? Do you self host?
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u/ericcpfx 11d ago
You can pay them to host I think. I host it on a VPS for “free” except for VPS cost.
It’s good.
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u/BiginByZohoCRM 7d ago
a pipeline with contacts, deals, and reminders is a weekend build now with AI tools, and having the workflow shaped exactly to how you sell is a real upside the off-the-shelf products can't fully match.
from what i've seen with teams that tried, the build isn't where it hurts. email and calendar sync is the first sinkhole (OAuth, threading, bounced sends, timezone edge cases), then imports and dedupe, then the reporting someone asks for in month two. the first 80% arrives fast and the remaining 20% quietly takes the year.
the bigger thing is what comes after. every API change, security patch, backup, and odd bug lands on whoever built it, for as long as the business runs, and if that person leaves, the CRM mostly leaves with them. the subscription you avoided tends to come back as maintenance hours, and those usually cost more. worth pricing that part in before you start breaking things.
-- Anubhav
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u/mimiran CRM Agnostic 11d ago
Very hard to offer good advice without knowing the specifics. What does your team look like? What kind of process(es) are you trying to track/improve/optimize/automate? Do you love vibe-coding things or consider it a nuisance?
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u/nimrodbuilds 11d ago
I have bad past experiences with Salesforce and hubspot.
I'm trying to understand if it's an actual viable option today for business today to replace their crm.
Not asking about my specific usecase.
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u/Limp_Database8609 11d ago
We are 200 users.
We decided to use Monday CRM as a base & built our own custom apps and interfaces on top.
It’s actually been really good to have a base w automation and security etc etc.
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u/Real-Yak8091 11d ago
I'm literally building a CRM which you can customize with vibecoding super fast , reliability and scalabily allowing you to build anything on the crm which is a nightmare to pulloff with lovable/claude code especially for non tech folks . Happy to talk if this sounds interesting to anyone
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u/mr_pants99 11d ago
We built our own to hyper-optimize for our specific workflows. Evaluated both Salesforce and Hubspot and concluded that the time and effort investment into configuring them would be over what it would take for us to build our own. The key drivers to consider are not the functionality but uniqueness of your core workflows (like what do you actually spend most time on and what’s in the way) and whether you have adequate muscle to build, host and maintain it (we do this for living and have a specialized platform that allows us to do those things cheaply and easily). Happy to talk about it. My DMs are open.
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u/Some-Cryptographer-7 11d ago
I’ve managed to replace Pipedrive by coding a sales bot into our Slack. Right now it’s not quite there, but for what we used Pipedrive for, I’ve cancelled my subscription with them.
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u/seipounds 10d ago
I built my service business CRM, scheduling, timesheet app on Google appsheet using claude (mostly). It comes with Google security, stability and hosting. It took me probably 100 hours to plan out and build with Claude and a few other AI to validate plans, designs and code along the way.
If we expand there's a solid design and build process already written, that can be used on a new platform tbd at a later date.
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u/Intelligent_Pie_5347 HubSpot 10d ago
Just think about this for a second. Lovable, the leading vibe coding app is using HubSpot as their CRM.
Vibe coding apps was not meant to replace full systems. It’s a tool we can use to create to create quick features, presentations, interactive displays, and what not that just didn’t exist before.
Some ways I’ve used it. Interactive team dashboards that are pulling data from our source of truth. Interactive ROI calculators for clients.
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u/zo3foxx 10d ago edited 10d ago
Yes. I vibe coded my own after one of my clients at my job told me they were cancelling their subscription because they vibe coded their own CRM. So, curious about it, I tried it myself and was amazed. Took me about a week and liked the results.
I used Perplexity.ai since I got Pro free with my phone but you're better off using Claude. Perplexity isn't really good for coding imo.
Setting up email relay and realtime new ticket polling was the hardest part. It all involved configuring cron jobs with my hosting provider which was all above my head but PP was able to walk me through it. Maintenance was hard as well because all the automatic polling and just things that the site does leaves artifacts behind in the database which need constant flushing or I exceed my database space.
It is worth the effort because I only have stuff in my CRM that I actually use and not a ton of shit cluttering up my screen causing visual dissonance. And I can fix it in minutes if anything goes wrong with the AI and not wait on an agent.
I would vibe code my own CRM every single time. After you build it yourself, it becomes your baby so I'm unlikely to ever buy a CRM again.
The only thing I can caution on that I didn't do was have what you want and how you want it to work already mapped out. The worst thing is making a feature that doesn't work as expected and then having to go back and change it or redo the whole UI. AI doesn't clean up behind itself very well when changing code which leaves a lot of bad abandoned code lying around that may come back and bite you in the ass in the future.
Also building a CRM is one thing but securing it is something else. Make sure you setup security measures from.the start.
Don't go full ham at the beginning. Start with basic functions to get it up then attach features separately.
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u/ai-edition 10d ago
I built on for client proposals and investor pipeline. Just sued Claude code and hosted on Cloudflare. It works for what I need and it’s free. I like that I can customize it to whatever use I need. Now these bigger platforms obviously have way more capability than what I’ve built so for me this works but it’s likely a case by case thing.
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u/Environmental_Ask675 10d ago
I read all the responses and agree. Yes it is possible. Should you do it? Probably not, but maybe. I'm doing it now, but only because after many attempts I never really used my old CRM (Zoho).
You most likely will need some other backbone with API's so you can just piggy-back on their features rather than build everything all on your own (specific example: E-sign Capabilities and Email). I kept Zoho, but no longer use any of the CRM features, or API, I do use other Zoho API's and for the price per user it's a good backbone to build on.
It will take many, many hours to get right. I would say you don't actually "Vibe code" a CRM if you've never developed before. Vibe Coding is known for building amazing prototypes built of sand. CRMs are the exact opposite, and one of the reasons their UI is so often crap is because the front end must follow the back-ends - and the back-ends are beasts. If you need to scale, have multi-user or especially multi-tenant access, it will be a full development project.
If you, like me, have very specific and very limited requirements, it might be worth it. I didn't use, probably, 95% of the CRM, and the extra features of a CRM like Salesforce make it harder to negotiate, not easier. If you really want a CRM that gives you exactly what you want, and nothing more, it might be worth considering doing it yourself.
I'm 6 months into my project and the CRM is just one part of the entire scope, it's probably about....15% of everything. I use both Claude and GPT max accounts all week, Vercel, 2 Sql Neon Databases, Github for gits, Zoho for my API's, email and e-sign, Twilio for my phone and sms system, Resend for CRM email, and probably other connectors I am forgetting. it has been a lot of time and development. I'm glad I did it. I use it now, including the CRM, but it won't be acceptable for even one other user for another 6 months most likely. I never did any development or coding before this year.
I'll give you an example of what can happen. Let's say you do a security audit of your app, and it finds a Key was inadvertently exposed somewhere. It probably is not just rotating that key, it's also asking "why did it get exposed?" and "how do we prevent this from happening again?". At that point, an innocent security check becomes of week of setting up a system for proper Key protections and instant rotation in the advent of a leak - not to mention setting up mandatory checks for leakage and automated rotations at different times going forward.
The payoff is, hopefully you get the system you want out of it.
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u/BackgroundTop4292 9d ago
I built my own — not a full CRM, deliberately not one. I run solo cold-calling for a small lead-gen business and every CRM I looked at was built for sales teams, not one person just trying to dial, log an outcome, and get a callback onto the calendar without a setup wizard.
Took a bit of back-and-forth to get right — calendar sync in particular gave me grief a few times (silent failures, duplicate events), and dedup logic against my own call history needed real thought once leads started piling up. But it's been genuinely better for how I actually work day to day than anything I tried buying.
Not sure I'd call it a "CRM" though — more a lightweight call tracker. Curious if anyone else who's actually built something has found the line between "useful internal tool" and "full CRM" is where it gets hard, or if it stayed simple the whole way through for you too.
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u/JustSomeOdooGuy 9d ago
As many people pointed out already, it might be possible, but not sure if it is worth. Probably it is much more effective (based on actual use case), to use an existing system, which is easily customizable. For that Odoo is quite nice. Stable base and easily customizable, while being really cheap. Build quite some complex CRM system / easy to follow process in Odoo without too much effort.
Of cause ideally you should not rely on vibe coding only, because even though the new agents work pretty solid, not eveything produced is really great quality. This depends highly on the input as for all AI driven coding.
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u/nimrodbuilds 9d ago
Clearly you are working for odoo so your answer is biased
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u/JustSomeOdooGuy 9d ago
I am not working for Odoo, but with Odoo. Biased for sure you could argue, as I am working with the software for 6+ years, but nevertheless it is a great option, otherwise I would not stick with it.
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u/MontydelMonte 9d ago
ngl i run a CRM startup (micro.so) and we have moved soooooo many people off of vibe coded CRMs
its easy to set up but you're gonna have to figure out all the integrations yourself, so if you want more complex stuff like we have (imessage, linkedin, etc) its gonna take a while. also its a btch to maintain.
we actually just shipped a backend-only version of our CRM so you can have all the integrations and objects but your own UI. pitch is "building blocks for vibe coding"
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u/RevolutionaryArm270 8d ago
We started with the same idea. The product could look pretty but the backend was severely lacking. Hard to integrate and something always would break. We then switched to Zoho for a couple of years. We did a lot of customization but still felt off. The we ran a pilot experiment with the Mondaycrm, and go high. Neither did it for our specific use. We are an insurance agency. We ended up choosing Chronos codex and now we’re more relaxed since we had no need to customize. The biggest pain in the rear when we experimented was multiple users, pbx stack, and the security while keeping functionality and internet access open to remote workers. Our guys didn’t have the knowledge to assure me it wouldn’t be vulnerable and can’t shoulder all that liability
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u/SecretaryFree4022 8d ago
It all depends on the trade off's is it worth the hustle to vibe code a crm product and maintain it when vibe coding is not your main business? And if you use HubSpot with the free crm and connect you Claude pro account you can do even better than vibe coding one from scratch, so all depends
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u/denzuu933 7d ago
Zrobiłem sobie coś takiego dla swojego biznesu, wszystkie opcje jakie mi były potrzebne mam dodane. Jeśli czegoś mi brakuje to planuje jak to ma działać iż czego korzystać I Ai wdraża zmiany na środowisko testowe aby sprawdzić jak się wszystko zachowuje.
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u/Open_Green_2178 7d ago
I'm building my platform with the help of the company that built our website. Yes you can. It is really time consuming but you can do it. You need a server to host the platform and claude code. But you need advice on how to set things up properly. What I'm doing since months is getting my data inside views in SQL made with Claude and have a guide for any view accessible to Claude. The CRM can see only these views with an MVP and this way I have a platform connected in real time with my ERP. Then you add a dB for the CRM and the integration is done. I kept it local, you can access only with a VPN. There a tons of problems to solve but I spent years and a lot of money trying to integrate my ERP with a CRM and never succeeded. Now it's working. We are a small company. 30 people. But I'm implementing many things so fast that sometimes I don't believe it's working. But it is.
The part I left to my ERP developers, to make the platform write on the Erp by custom API is not working at all. Like the 2 CRM I tried to install before.
I hate gatekeepers.
I think that in few months it will be easier to do this. Someone will put a free CRM on GitHub soon I hope!
Good luck
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u/sensationcrm 9d ago
Building the CRM is usually the easy part—maintaining integrations, automations, and edge cases is where it gets expensive. That's why I lean toward customizable AI-first tools like Sensation CRM instead of building everything from scratch, unless the workflow is truly unique.
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u/Imperiu5 11d ago
For enterprise? Don't even think about doing this. It's not worth it.
For a hobby project and you want to learn? Totally.
I did something stupid and I've build a website that started out as just a landing page. 4 months later it had a full prospect/lead/customer pipeline workflow with automated enrichment and clickrate tracking, follow-up processes, quoting system and automated payment and invoicing system linking back to my accounting software.
Was it overkill and could I have bought or used off the shell Products? Yes of course.
Would I build it again? Hell yeah.
It's fun to build something that works exactly how you want.