You can absolutely vibecode a CRM.
We did. It took two years.
We're the last company on earth allowed to tell you not to build software with AI. We ship an MCP server. We tell your assistant to go and run our product. Half our pitch is that you shouldn't have to wait for a vendor. So this isn't that page. This is the list of what's actually in the box, written by the people who built the box.
Week one is
genuinely amazing.
We're not going to be sniffy about this part, because it's real. You describe what you want and you get contacts, companies and deals, linked properly. Table and board views. Filters that work. An import that reads your messy spreadsheet and sorts it out. A chat box where you can ask your own database questions in English. It looks good, and it's fast.
- It's fast because it has eleven records in it. for now
- Two years ago that was a quarter of engineering. Now it's a Saturday. genuinely
- But that's the part of a CRM that was always easy. tables and views were never why CRMs cost money
Then the rest
of it arrives.
In roughly the order each one bites. None of it is intellectually hard, which is exactly what makes it dangerous: every item is a small, boring, entirely solvable problem, and there are about forty of them.
- Week oneyou
You build it, and it's genuinely amazing.
Contacts, companies and deals linked properly. Table and board views, filters that work, an import that sorts out your messy spreadsheet, a chat box you can ask questions in English. Two years ago that was a quarter of engineering. Now it's a Saturday.
- Month twoyou
You connect email, and it isn't an afternoon.
Forty small boring solvable problems, met one at a time over eight months. The list is below, because this is the one that gets everybody.
- Month fiveyou
You send email, and your domain stops working.
The one that can hurt the business rather than the weekend. There's no error message: your ordinary mail just stops arriving and it takes a month to work out why.
- Some Fridayyou
Somebody imports the wrong CSV over the top of everything.
Now you need soft deletes, an undo, an audit trail, backups you have actually restored from once, and a way to roll back one bad import without losing the four good days on top of it.
- The first real customerthem
They ask a question you can't answer.
Where is the data, in which country, who are the subprocessors, can we have a DPA, what's your breach process, can you honour a deletion across every table including the backups and the logs. I built it myself and it's on a Postgres box is an honest answer that ends the conversation.
And then, permanently, you are the vendor.
The CRM is now a thing your company depends on and there is exactly one person who understands it. That person is on call, not formally, just in the sense that when it breaks during a customer's crisis at 11pm there's nobody else to ring, and you know it, so you look. You go on holiday and take the laptop. Somebody asks for a small change and it isn't small. Six months pass and you open your own code and don't remember why it does that. The bus factor is one, and the uncomfortable bit is that the one isn't a stranger who might leave. It's you, and you're not going anywhere, which is precisely the problem.
Then you
connect email.
This is the one that gets everybody, because it's the one thing a CRM absolutely must do and it looks like an afternoon. It is not an afternoon. In rough order of when each one bites.
- The refresh token expires in a way you didn't handle. OAuth works, then it quietly doesn't, and email stops syncing. Nobody notices for nine days.
- Threading. A reply-all with a changed subject line is the same conversation, and your code thinks it's two.
- Matching a message to the right customer. They email from a personal address, or a new colleague joins the thread, or the domain is gmail.com and tells you nothing.
- Attachments, inline images and quoted history. Plus the signature block that makes every message look like it contains a new contact.
- Somebody forwards in a thread from six months ago. It should file backwards in time, into a history that already looked complete.
- Shared mailboxes, aliases and delegated accounts. And the person who has three addresses, all of them real.
- Gmail and Outlook disagree about almost all of the above. So most of it gets written twice, and the second one is worse.
- Then it works, and a customer turns out to have 40,000 messages. And your sync job runs at startup.
Ours connects Gmail and Outlook on every plan including the free one, and every item on that list is a thing we have already been wrong about at least once.
Then you send email, and
your domain stops working.
The bill
nobody writes down.
Running your own
monthly, forever
- Hosting, database, backupsMonthly, forever.real money
- Transactional email providerPlus a sender reputation to manage.real money
- Error monitoring and uptime alertsBecause otherwise you find out from a customer.real money
- AI tokens for the assistant you built inSame as everyone else's.metered
- Your hours, week oneGenuinely. No notes.a delight
- Your hours, months two to twenty-fourThis is the line nobody writes down.the actual price
The maintenance never ends. That's the whole difference between this column and the next one.
SoftSync Pro
5 seats · 12 months
- Per seat, per monthAnnual billing.$29
- Five seats, twelve months$1,740
- Hosting, backups, monitoringincluded
- Email sending and deliverabilityIncluding the reputation, which is ours to lose rather than yours.included
- Being on call at 11pmnot you
Decide what your Saturdays cost and the comparison usually makes itself. Not because our software is worth more than your time, but because the maintenance never ends and the licence does.
Our own prices, from softsync.ai/pricing. The left-hand column has no figures because most of it genuinely doesn't have one, which is the argument rather than a dodge. softsync.ai/pricing
When you genuinely
should build it.
Sometimes the answer is build it, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
- Your process is genuinely unlike anyone else's. Not we do sales a bit differently, but actually structurally different, in a way no product could be shaped to. It happens.
- The CRM is your product. If you're selling the thing, you should own the thing.
- You're one or two people and you enjoy it. If building it is the fun part of your week, that's a real return, and we're not going to argue you out of a hobby that also does a job.
- You need something so small it isn't really a CRM. A list, a form and a reminder. Don't buy a CRM for that. Don't build one either.
The boring parts,
already done.
Email sync for Gmail and Outlook, deliverability, permissions, audit, backups, migrations and the compliance answers. Two years of them.
Build the interesting part on top. You still get to build. You just don't get paged at 11pm because a refresh token expired.
The version we'd actually
recommend: build on one.
The boring, endless parts of a CRM benefit from being somebody's full-time job for years. The interesting part, the bit specific to your business, is a small piece of code on top. So build that piece, on us. The MCP server below connects Claude or ChatGPT and lets them do anything you can do in the product. The REST API is at https://api.softsync.ai/openapi/softsync/docs, eighty operations across sixty-six paths, including objects, where you create your own record types.
Endpoint counts read from our own OpenAPI document on 10 September 2026. And one more thing, offered as a peer rather than a pitch: the six written manuals our server hands your assistant exist because we got all of this wrong first. That document is two years of finding out how this product breaks, and the only way to write your own is to break things in front of real customers.
Try the boring
version for free.
Keep the Saturday project. Genuinely. Build the thing that's specific to you and connect it over the API. Just maybe don't own the email sync. Free forever, three seats, the whole CRM, no card. If it turns out you'd rather have built it, you've lost an afternoon and you can export everything.