Total cost of a CRM: what to add beyond the license

A company compares three CRMs by price per user and picks the cheapest. Six months later it finds missing items: onboarding, features charged separately, ERP integration, training. This guide gathers what the official pages themselves say is charged and proposes how to add it up.

A note: the prices are those each vendor shows on its page, checked on October 23, 2026, in US dollars, and may change; each page warns that they are informational or that the final price can vary. Implementation and training percentages are not published, so we do not invent them: each company supplies them from its quotes. The criteria are Cyrrus's.

Which prices do vendors publish?

HubSpot also shows free, Starter and Professional plans (the latter with a one-time onboarding fee of US$1,500), but its page does not clearly say which figure is monthly and which annual; for that reason we leave them out of the table.

Which costs do those figures leave out?

Budget your CRM over several years

We help build the total cost with licenses, implementation, integrations, training and add-ons.

• 3 or 5 year total cost per alternative
• Questions to ask each vendor

See CRM selection

The pages themselves say so:

Salesforce: the pricing page publishes no implementation price; it mentions professional services and certified partners. Some support is included by plan (the Premier success plan comes with Core, Advanced and Max, and is an add-on for Pro Suite). Add-ons are charged separately: for example Agentforce for Sales from US$125 per user per month, Revenue Intelligence from US$220 and Revenue Cloud from US$200.

Microsoft: Copilot Credits are sold separately, pre-purchased or pay-as-you-go, and using agents requires an Azure subscription. Sales Premium includes 1,000 credits per user. The page warns that prices may not reflect the actual list price.

HubSpot: the onboarding fee for Professional and Enterprise is not included in the per-user price. For some data quality tools, such as bulk duplicate management and custom rules, HubSpot states that its Data Hub is required, which is another subscription.

How do you build the total cost?

Six items, per Cyrrus's judgment: licenses (users times price times 12 months times the years analyzed), add-ons and credits, onboarding or implementation, integrations (with the ERP and other tools), training and change management, and the internal team that administers the system. The last four have no published price: they are obtained by getting quotes and estimating the team's time.

Compare without bias

We assess alternatives without being tied to a vendor and hand you the assumptions behind each calculation.

• Comparison by scenario
• Explicit assumptions

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Illustrative example: the number of users is an assumption. With 25 users, the Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise licenses alone would be 25 × US$105 × 12 = US$31,500 a year, and Salesforce Core 25 × US$195 × 12 = US$58,500 a year. Those are the license sums; every other item is missing.

For the same exercise with an ERP, see how much an ERP implementation costs.

What should leadership ask each vendor?

Four things, per Cyrrus's judgment. First, the full list of what is charged apart from the per-user price. Second, the onboarding or implementation cost, in writing. Third, how much the price changes if the number of users goes up or down. Fourth, how data is exported if you ever change vendors.

How we can help

At Cyrrus we build the total cost of a CRM from your own quotes, without selling a product of our own. Learn about CRM selection, and to compare the three products see the Salesforce, HubSpot and Dynamics 365 comparison.

If you want a second look at your budget, request a free diagnostic session with our team.