What a CRM actually costs a brokerage

There are no prices on this page, deliberately. There is a worksheet with every line item including the ones nobody budgets, and the question that makes a vendor put a number against each.

Articles on this topic normally open with an industry average. You cannot budget from an average of vendors you are not buying, and most of those averages were invented by someone with no better source than you have.

Download the cost worksheet (CSV)

The four kinds of cost, and which one surprises people

Subscription is the number on the website and the one everybody compares. It is rarely the biggest.

One-off is setup, data migration and training. Migration is where quotes diverge most, and where "we will sort that out" turns into an hourly bill.

Internal time is the one that surprises. Someone in your brokerage will spend days cleaning and exporting the book, everybody loses hours to training, and output dips while people learn. None of that appears on any vendor's quote and all of it is real payroll. For a small brokerage it frequently exceeds the first year's licence.

Exit is what it costs to leave. Ask before you sign, because the answer is much less friendly afterwards.

Three questions that change the total

What has the renewal increase been for existing customers? You are signing up for years, not one. A vendor who will not answer this has answered it.
What is included in migration, and what is billed hourly? Get the boundary in the contract. This is the single most common overrun.
Does the connection to my management system cost extra, and who bills it? Sometimes the CRM is free to connect and the AMS vendor charges for the other end. Two companies, two invoices, one surprise.

How to use the worksheet

Three years of columns, because one year flatters whichever vendor has the lowest setup fee and the steepest increases. Fill it in per vendor and compare the three-year totals, not the monthly prices.

For internal time, write down your assumption rather than leaving it blank. "Two people for three days at our loaded hourly rate" is an estimate you can defend and revise. A blank is a zero you did not mean.

Our own prices are published on the pricing page, so the subscription rows fill themselves for CovioIQ. Most of the Canadian management systems are quote-only, which is normal for that category and means you will need the conversation regardless.

Reduce the largest line

The internal-time row shrinks fastest when the data going in is already clean. Cleaning before you migrate costs the same hours and saves you doing them twice.

Clean it first Score the vendors