Published seat pricing runs $25 to $550
Salesforce lists Starter Suite at $25, Pro Suite at $100, Enterprise at $175, Unlimited at $350 and Agentforce 1 Sales at $550, in US dollars per user per month.
Typical Annual Cost
$50,000 - $500,000+ / year
Derived from Salesforce published Sales Cloud edition pricing (Professional / Enterprise / Unlimited) at 25-250 seats, plus typical add-on and integration licensing. Verify at salesforce.com/pricing. Collected July 2026.
High (Apex governor limits, per-24-hour API allocations)
Architectural Risk Comparison
Own Your Pipeline: An Alternative to Salesforce CRM & Commerce
A secure, serverless Next.js and Postgres database deployment designed to bypass the licensing tax of Salesforce CRM & Commerce — with 100% code ownership at handover.
Quick Answer
In short: ERPStack provides a custom, license-free alternative to Salesforce CRM & Commerce. You get 100% data and IP ownership, zero seat-based fees, and a dedicated cloud deployment delivered in weeks.
Vivek Mishra — Founder & Lead Architect, ERPStack
Salesforce alternative: is a custom CRM you own worth it?
Yes, past a certain size. Migrating from Salesforce runs 8-16 weeks and saves $50,000 to $500,000 a year in licensing. What you own afterwards is a custom CRM and ERP platform built on Next.js, React and PostgreSQL, with zero user seat restrictions and no daily API allocation.
What Salesforce still does better
Salesforce's real moat is people and packages — a large pool of trained administrators, and AppExchange apps for problems you have not had yet. Enterprise includes a Partial Sandbox and Unlimited includes a Full Sandbox, which is more environment provisioning than most vendors give. If your process changes weekly and you want a non-engineer to change it, Salesforce is designed for exactly that and a custom CRM is not.
What replaces Salesforce CRM & Commerce
Accounts, contacts, opportunities and orders as real relational tables in PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM rather than sparse platform objects. A React and TypeScript interface; a REST and GraphQL API with no daily allocation; RBAC and row-level security; SSO with JWT sessions; Redis for queues; Sentry for error tracking; Vitest and Playwright in GitHub Actions. Runs on Vercel, AWS or Microsoft Azure in your own account — one CRM, unlimited seats.
Head-to-Head Architecture Matchup
4 of 4 capabilities shown
| Capability | Custom ERPStack build | Salesforce CRM & Commerce |
|---|---|---|
| Data ModelData & Ownership | Relational & Strict (PostgreSQL) | Proprietary Object/Blob storage |
| Frontend FlexibilityPlatform | Any UI Library (Tailwind, Radix) | Locked to Lightning Web Components |
| API LimitsExtensibility | Unlimited (Infrastructure bounds) | Strict daily caps & expensive overages |
| Offline Local DevelopmentExtensibility | Entire stack runs on a laptop with no network and no vendor account | Salesforce DX supports local editing and version control, but compilation and testing require a connected scratch or sandbox org |
Legacy Pain Points
- Per-user seat pricing that limits operational scale
- Apex database lock-in and API call constraints
- Rigid Lightning UI customization barriers
The Custom Code Advantage
- No per-user licensing fees—scale to unlimited users
- Payload CMS and database schema absolute control
- Sub-100ms Next.js client portals
Interactive TCO Model
Calculate Your 3-Year IP Savings
Drag the team-size slider to model SaaS licensing spend against a fixed-cost custom build — implementation, hosting, and 3-year TCO update in real time.
50 Users
10 seats500 seats
Proprietary SaaS (3-Year)
$233,200
- • Base Implementation: $55,000
- • License Taxation: $178,200
- • Data Ownership: Rented
Custom Built ERP (3-Year)
$76,050
- • One-Time Build: $45,000
- Custom Hosting (3 Yrs): $10,800
- Maintenance & Support (3 Yrs): $20,250
- 100% Code & Data Ownership
Your 3-Year Savings
$157,150
Your 3-year overspend if you stay on SaaS
$157,150
Staying on per-seat licensing costs you $4,365 every month at 50 seats — spend that never converts into owned IP.
Uncovering Hidden Constraints
Hidden Cost: API Access As A Line Item
On Salesforce CRM & Commerce, stacked on the $50,000 - $500,000+ / year base license.
Custom build: API Access As A Line Item
On the Sales Cloud pricing page Salesforce lists Web Services API as an additional $25 USD per user per month on the Pro Suite tier. Programmatic access to your own records is a SKU, not a given.
Hidden Cost: An API Allocation Tied To Seat Count
On Salesforce CRM & Commerce, stacked on the $50,000 - $500,000+ / year base license.
Custom build: An API Allocation Tied To Seat Count
An Enterprise Edition org is allocated 100,000 API calls per 24 hours plus 1,000 per Salesforce licence — 115,000 for 15 licences, in Salesforce's own worked example — and no more than 25 inbound requests lasting 20 seconds or longer may run at once. Teams buy licences to raise throughput.
Migration Blueprint Specification
- Typical Annual Cost
- $50,000 - $500,000+ / year
- Derived from Salesforce published Sales Cloud edition pricing (Professional / Enterprise / Unlimited) at 25-250 seats, plus typical add-on and integration licensing. Verify at salesforce.com/pricing. Collected July 2026.
- Modularity
- Low (Blob schemas, difficult multi-org consolidation)
- Customization Limits
- Proprietary platform friction (Forced into Lightning frameworks)
- Extraction Pathway
- Incremental client migration to Next.js + Payload CMS architectures
The Escape Plan
Phase 12 Weeks
Data Export
Bulk API export of all custom objects and relations.
Phase 23 Weeks
Schema Normalization
Converting Salesforce objects into normalized SQL tables.
Phase 34-8 Weeks
Logic Porting
Rewriting Apex triggers into Next.js Server Actions.
Phase 4Phased
UI Rollout
Gradual rollout of the new React-based interface to sales teams.
Frequently Asked Questions
With the same controls, written into the application rather than bought as a tier: RBAC on every query, row-level security in PostgreSQL, SSO and JWT sessions, encryption at rest through your cloud provider's key service, and an immutable audit trail. ERPStack holds no certifications itself — what we build is designed to pass a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 assessment that your company runs. That is a real difference from Salesforce and we would rather state it than blur it.
Yes, all of it. Custom objects, standard objects, activity history, attachments and the relationships between them export through the Bulk API and land in a normalised PostgreSQL schema we design with you. The step people underestimate is not the export, it is the shape: Salesforce objects are wide and sparse, and turning them into relational tables is where the reporting you have wanted for years finally becomes cheap to build.
Engineering time, and sometimes licences you do not need. A Salesforce Enterprise Edition org is allocated 100,000 API calls per 24 hours plus 1,000 per licence, and no more than 25 concurrent inbound requests may run for 20 seconds or longer. Teams end up buying extra user licences purely to raise the allocation. On your own PostgreSQL cluster the ceiling is the hardware you provisioned, and it moves when you decide to move it.
Sales organisations whose process changes faster than an engineering team can ship, and companies relying on Salesforce AppExchange packages with no clean equivalent. The trained administrator talent pool around Salesforce is real and worth money. A custom CRM wins when seat costs dominate the budget, when read-only users are denied access for cost reasons, or when your data model genuinely does not fit the standard objects.
What Salesforce CRM & Commerce’s own documentation says
Every figure below was read from the vendor’s own published page on 2 August 2026. Vendor terms change without notice — follow the link and check the number yourself before you decide anything on it. Whatever we could not source that way is not on this page.
API access can be a paid add-on
On the same pricing page, Web Services API is listed as "Additional $25 USD/user/month". Programmatic access to your own records is a SKU on that tier, not a default.
The API allocation is a formula tied to licences
Enterprise Edition orgs get 100,000 calls per 24 hours plus 1,000 per Salesforce licence — Salesforce's worked example is 115,000 requests for 15 licences. No more than 25 inbound requests lasting 20 seconds or longer may run at once, per production org or sandbox, or the API returns REQUEST_LIMIT_EXCEEDED.
Apex runs inside hard governor limits
Per synchronous transaction: 100 SOQL queries, 50,000 records retrieved, 150 DML statements, 6 MB of heap and 10,000 ms of CPU time. Those are the ceilings your business logic has to fit inside, permanently.
Parts of the org are skipped by the export
Salesforce publishes the list of objects skipped when exporting to MySQL, Amazon S3, Azure Blob or Snowflake endpoints — among them ApexClass, ApexTrigger, ApexPage, EmailTemplate, FlowInterview, ProcessInstanceWorkitem and Profile — and states that objects with Feed, Tag, Share and History suffixes are generally excluded from complete backups, though they can be selected manually. The Salesforce records come out. The code, the flow state, the sharing model and the field history need a deliberate second pass.
Salesforce Help — Salesforce Objects Excluded from Exports (read 15 August 2026)
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