Open-source CRM vs HubSpot for a 15-person firm

For a 15-person B2B service firm, HubSpot is the faster start and the larger long-term bill; an open-source CRM is the cheaper, owned alternative that needs someone to look after it. Feature lists will not separate them — both hold contacts, deals and a pipeline perfectly well at this scale. The real trade is money versus maintenance, and rented convenience versus owned data.

What is a 15-person firm actually buying?

Strip the vendor language away and a service firm this size needs four things from a CRM: a contact record that stays current, a pipeline with stages that mean something, activity logging that mostly happens by itself, and a clean feed into reporting. That last one is the point of the whole exercise — the CRM is the data layer under the numbers an MD should see without anyone compiling them, which is the argument of The MD Dashboard Blueprint.

Notice what is not on the list: marketing automation suites, revenue intelligence, AI deal scoring. At 15 people you have one pipeline and a handful of people feeding it. Most of what higher CRM tiers sell is built for problems you do not have yet.

What does HubSpot really cost?

HubSpot's free tier is genuinely useful, and for a firm with no technical capacity it is often the right first move. The cost arrives later, and it arrives on a curve. The pattern I see repeatedly: a firm starts free, grows into the limits — custom reports, required fields, automation triggers, more than a token number of sequences — and discovers the feature it needs sits one or two tiers up. By the time a 15-person firm has several paid sales seats on a mid-level tier, the bill commonly runs to thousands of pounds a year. Pricing changes often, so check current numbers, but the direction is reliable: the price climbs with your headcount and with your dependence.

Dependence is the quieter cost. Your pipeline history, contact records and every logged call live in someone else's system, at someone else's future prices. Exporting the data is possible; rebuilding the workflows around it elsewhere is a project. That is not an argument against HubSpot — it is a well-built product — but it should be priced into the decision, not discovered at renewal.

What does open-source cost, honestly?

The licence costs nothing. Hosting an open-source CRM — Relaticle, EspoCRM, Twenty and others — on a small VPS typically costs less per month than a single paid seat on a commercial tier. The real cost is attention: someone has to apply updates, keep backups running, and fix the occasional breakage. Budget a few hours a quarter. If nobody in the firm will own those hours, the saving is an illusion, because an unmaintained system decays into exactly the kind of graveyard nobody trusts.

We run Relaticle at Total Format, and the deciding factor for us was not the licence fee. It was that the database is ours: the dashboard reads it directly with a query rather than through a rate-limited API, and every fact about the pipeline is on infrastructure we control.

When does each make sense?

The decision reduces to a handful of when-then rules:

• When there is no technical person in or near the firm and the CRM must be live this week, then take HubSpot's free tier and make the trade knowingly.
• When the quote for the paid tier you actually need exceeds the cost of a small server plus a day of maintenance per quarter, then open-source is cheaper from the first month.
• When reporting is the priority and you want direct access to your own data, then open-source wins — a dashboard built on your own database never hits an API ceiling.
• When you are 15 people planning to be 40, then model the per-seat cost over three years, not one. Per-seat pricing compounds with exactly the growth you are hoping for.

What matters more than which you pick?

Two things sink CRMs at this size, and neither is the vendor. The first is scattered facts: deals in the CRM, files in five places, metrics in a spreadsheet someone updates when reminded — the fix is one system of record per fact, decided before you migrate anything. The second is filling it with the wrong people: a CRM full of poorly chosen prospects reports beautifully on a pipeline that will never close, and if you cannot name your buyer, the CRM decision is premature anyway.

Both options pass the only test that matters — will the team update it, and can the numbers be read without anyone compiling them. The wider selection criteria, beyond this head-to-head, are in choosing a CRM for a 5–50-staff service firm.

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