What does a CRM really cost?

1. The subscription, and how it grows

Most packages charge per user per month. That looks like the fairest arrangement and sometimes is, but work out two figures, not one: what it costs now, and what it costs if your team doubles in two years.

With per-user pricing that line doubles with it. Which has a side effect that never appears in a quote: you stop giving everyone an account. The office doesn’t look in, the lads on the vans log nothing, and half your customer contact is back in somebody’s inbox.

Check the monthly figure against the annual one too. A discount for paying up front is normal, but it makes leaving more expensive than it looks.

Some suppliers charge per company rather than per user, which removes the growth question entirely. Nermio is one of them: €20 a month for the whole company when you pay for the year, which is €240, or €24 a month paying month to month. Whether a price you’ve been quoted includes VAT is a question worth putting to every supplier, ours included — and the next section is why.

VAT at 23%, and whether you get it back

Software delivered over the internet is an electronic service, and Revenue’s VAT rates database puts electronic services at the standard rate under section 46(1)(a) of the Value-Added Tax Consolidation Act 2010. The standard rate is 23%, effective from 1 January 2026. So a CRM quoted at €30.00 a month excluding VAT is €36.90 with it.

Over the three years you should be comparing, that is €1,080.00 against €1,328.40 — a difference of €248.40, which is larger than the gap between a lot of packages. Which of those two numbers is yours depends on one thing: whether you can reclaim it.

Revenue’s rule is short. If you are making taxable supplies of goods and services, you may reclaim the VAT charged on goods and services used for the purposes of those supplies, through your VAT 3 return. If you are not registered for VAT, different rules apply — and in practice that means the gross figure is the one that leaves your account. So compare net if you’re registered, gross if you’re not, and never one supplier’s net price against another’s gross.

One trap on the other side of that, straight from Revenue: if you are registered for VAT, the amount you claim as an expense should not include the VAT amount. You reclaim the VAT once, on the VAT return. You don’t get it a second time as a deduction against your profit.

And if your supplier is established outside Ireland, the way the VAT appears on the invoice can work differently again. That one is a question for whoever files your returns, not for a pricing page.

2. Setting it up

With larger packages this is often the biggest cost of year one, and it isn’t on the pricing page. Implementation, configuration, training, data migration — billed separately, usually by the hour.

The question that predicts that figure: how much has to be set up before this is any use to me? If the answer is a project of several weeks for a business of five people, what you’re buying is mostly the complexity of the product.

Count your own hours as well. Four people in a training session for a day is a day you don’t invoice. What else to weigh up while choosing is in choosing a CRM.

3. Integrations and extras

Email, calendar, bookkeeping, phone system, forms on your website — a lot of that sits in a higher tier or costs extra each month. Sometimes it runs through a third party that charges its own subscription on top.

Write down what you genuinely need before you ask for a quote, then ask about each item separately: included, or not? A package that looks cheaper but needs three paid connectors isn’t cheaper.

One line on that list now has a date attached to it in Ireland: eInvoicing. Revenue’s VAT Modernisation timeline puts phase 1 at November 2028, when VAT-registered large corporates have to issue eInvoices and report in real time for domestic business-to-business transactions. Phase 2 extends the domestic obligation in November 2029 to VAT-registered businesses trading cross-border in the EU, and phase 3 in July 2030 is the EU-wide ViDA requirement.

The part that applies to everyone is quieter, and it is in the same timeline: for all phases, businesses must be able to receive and process eInvoices from any supplier mandated to issue them. So a PDF is not the end of the story forever. But nothing today obliges a five-person firm to issue structured invoices, and a module sold to you on a 2028 deadline is being sold early. Buy it when you want it — and do ask a supplier you’re signing a three-year habit with what their plan for 2028 is.

4. The price of leaving

This is the line nobody budgets for and the one that can hurt most. If you want to move in two years, can you get your data out — notes and history included — in a format another system can read?

If you can’t, or only by request and for a fee, there’s an amount in your future that you can’t see today. Ask before you sign, and ask for the export format by name. What a usable export looks like is in getting your data out.

The part Revenue carries

One line usually works in your favour, and it’s worth knowing before you compare. Revenue’s own wording is that when calculating the profit for your business you may be able to claim a deduction for expenses incurred, claimed through ROS on a Form 11 or a Form CT1 — so this works the same way whether you trade as a sole trader or through a company. What qualifies are the expenses directly related to the running of your business.

That also settles the question most people actually have, which is whether software gets written down over years instead. Revenue defines capital expenditure as money you spend on buying or maintaining land, property or equipment, and says you cannot claim a deduction for it when calculating your profit — you may be able to claim capital allowances instead, and computer software is on Revenue’s list of assets capital allowances can be claimed on. A monthly subscription is none of those three things: you are not buying an asset, so it is simply a cost of the year you pay it. Buy software outright and you are in the other regime, which is one more reason two offers can differ by more than their monthly figure.

So the comparison that matters is the after-tax one. It doesn’t change which package is cheapest, but it does change how much weight a few euro a month deserves in the decision. How your own return is built is a question for whoever files it.

A sum you can do in five minutes

For each package you’re considering, write these five lines under each other, over three years:

1. The subscription now, times 36 months — net if you can reclaim the VAT, gross if you can’t.
2. The subscription for a team half again as large, for the last 18 of those months.
3. One-off setup: what the supplier charges, plus your own hours.
4. Integrations and add-ons per month, times 36.
5. An estimate of what it would cost to get back out again.

The result often surprises people. The package with the lowest monthly price isn’t always the cheapest, and the dearest subscription sometimes is — if setup and the connectors you need are already in it.

What it costs not to do it

The other side of the ledger is harder to pin down, but it’s real. One missed follow-up a month that you would otherwise have won is, in most small businesses, several times the annual cost of any of this.

That isn’t an argument for buying the expensive option. It is an argument against spending three weeks optimising a few euro a month when the actual question is whether you’ll keep the thing up to date. If you’re not yet sure you need one at all, the spreadsheet question comes first.

It’s also worth knowing how unusual you are either way, because the gap by size is wide. In the CSO’s 2025 figures, 23.3% of small enterprises used CRM software, against 50.2% of medium-sized and 66.0% of large ones. And that survey starts at ten people, so a business smaller than that isn’t in the figure at all. Whatever sits behind that gap, it isn’t the monthly price on its own — which is the case for asking the two questions above before you ask the price: how little setup do I need, and how do I get my data out again.