Custom software and CRM in Costa Rica

What companies here actually ask for

Almost nobody arrives asking for a CRM. They arrive saying something else: that nobody knows what happened to a quote, that a good client drifted away and it took months to notice, that the salesperson who resigned left with the contacts in their phone, that finding out what the company sold last month requires asking three people.

It is all the same problem. The information about your customers does not live anywhere. It is spread across WhatsApp, email, a spreadsheet somebody maintains, a notebook and the owner's memory.

The comparison nobody makes to your face

Search for a CRM today and you find HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce, Odoo, Bitrix24, Pipedrive and monday. They are good products and thousands of companies run on them. Here is something against our own interest: plenty of businesses need nothing more than one of those, and when that is true we say so instead of selling a development project.

What genuinely differs between the two models:

• How you pay. Subscription: per user, per month, forever, rising with headcount and with every feature that sits one tier up. Custom: paid once to build, then maintenance.
• Who adapts to whom. Subscription products are generic by design — the same software has to serve a real estate office, a clinic and a distributor. If your process resembles the standard one, excellent. If it does not, you will be the one changing.
• Where the data sits. On the vendor's servers under their terms, or wherever you choose with direct access to the database.
• What happens when you grow. On a subscription, fifteen salespeople cost five times what three do. On a system you own, adding people does not change what the system costs.
• How well it integrates. Subscriptions integrate what they shipped; anything else goes through connectors you pay for separately. Ours connects to what you already use — including Costa Rican electronic invoicing and the WhatsApp number your customers actually write to.

We do not publish those vendors' prices, because they change and a stale number helps nobody. Ask for the current one, multiply by the users you expect to have in three years, and compare that against a single build. The arithmetic decides on its own.

The part foreign-built software gets wrong here

A system designed in the United States or Europe does not know that invoices in this country have to be issued in the Hacienda format, that a serious share of payments arrive by SINPE Móvil, or that the entire sales conversation happens on WhatsApp rather than email. Those are not cosmetic gaps; they are the difference between software that runs the operation and software that someone has to copy numbers out of every afternoon.

What we build when it does make sense

• Customers and contacts in one place, with the full history.
• Quotes under your rules: volume pricing, authorised discounts, validity, approvals.
• Follow-up that tells you who to call back and when — where the money you are losing today comes back.
• Inventory connected, when what you can quote depends on what you have.
• Invoicing wired to the electronic invoicing you already use.
• Reports on what you need to look at, not forty dashboards nobody opens.
• Roles and permissions: who sees what, who can approve and who cannot.
• Installable on a phone as a progressive web app: an icon, works without signal, updates itself, no app store — see mobile app development.
• Integrations with WhatsApp, email, your online store and your accounting.

When we will tell you not to build

Two or three salespeople, a common sales process and no unusual rules? Start with a subscription CRM. It costs less to begin and it works tomorrow. Move the day the tool starts getting in your way, not before.

We say this because the business that felt pushed into buying what it did not need does not come back. We would rather have the project two years from now, when it is real. The same goes for replacing an ERP that works: the path that actually pays is leaving the packaged system doing the accounting and building alongside it the part it does badly — your own process, the one that gives you an edge. That also means smaller projects for us, and we say it anyway.