Quoted $900 flat to set up a three agent team's CRM. How do I scope that?

The support window is where your $900 goes. I did flat fees with "30 days of support included" for the first two years and the honest cost of that on a three user team was about six hours of phone calls, most of it re-teaching the same two people how to log a call.

Price it as build plus training, separately. The build is a fixed number of pipelines and a fixed number of automations, written down, and anything past that count is change order. Training is per session, and you sell two.

Before Friday, ask them one question: when a lead comes in at 10pm and nobody answers, who is responsible for it the next morning? If they can't name a person, you're building a filing cabinet for a team that doesn't file. That's not a technology problem and $900 won't fix it.

Dumb question since I'm circling the same kind of work: could you just do this in something generic like Airtable plus a scheduler and skip the real estate platforms entirely? Cheaper for them, and you'd own the build instead of learning someone else's product.

$900 also sounds fine to me for 14 hours of work? That's your rate either way, so I don't understand why the structure matters as much as thatch says.

@beacon it matters because the two structures fail differently. Flat fee fails when scope grows, hourly fails when the client doesn't trust the clock. With people you met at a networking event and no track record, flat with a hard scope list is easier to defend, and you learn where your estimates are wrong at your own expense once.

On the generic build: you can, and it will work until they want text and calls in the same timeline. Then you're stitching a phone system into it and you become the phone system's support desk. For a three agent shop taking 55 portal leads a month, use something built for the job and charge for configuring it well.

On the messaging registration, plan for it in writing. Business registration with the carriers has taken anywhere from a few days to three weeks in the builds I've watched, rejections happen over small mismatches in the business details, and it isn't something you control. Put a line in the proposal saying text delivery starts after approval, dated separately from the rest of the build. Otherwise your last milestone sits unpaid while everyone waits on a queue.

$900 for three users, one pipeline, four automations, plus two training sessions billed separately, is a defensible first quote. Your second one goes up.

Never quote before you've opened the panel. Get read-only access to whatever they've got now, spend an hour in it, then send the number.

Two things nobody's said yet.

The deliverable that keeps you out of month-two hell is a written runbook. Screenshots, what each automation does, who to call when it stops. Six pages. My team hands one over on every build and support calls dropped by more than half, because the answer is in the document and the client knows it.

Second, the account has to be in the client's name with their card on it. Not yours. If you host their sub-account under your agency plan you're now the billing department and you can't walk away cleanly, and if the relationship ends badly they'll ask you to hand over data you have no clean process for exporting. Agree on the export path before you build, @plumb, not when someone's annoyed.