CRM: the fee that is not monthly, and the annual price nobody prints

Every CRM in our records prices per user per month, which makes the category look easy to compare and is where the trouble starts. The monthly per-seat figure is the smallest part of several of these decisions, and in one case it is not even the largest number involved in the first year.

Insightly's integration line carries a required technical setup fee — the word on the page is 'required', so it is not an option you decline. On the entry tier of that line, twelve months of subscription plus that one-off comes to a total of which the setup fee is a fraction over half. Whatever you concluded by comparing monthly prices, the first year is roughly double what that comparison suggested. It is the first mandatory one-off charge we have recorded anywhere in this base, and it is worth asking every vendor in the category about explicitly, because a fee that appears once does not appear in a monthly comparison at all.

Close prices more conventionally and does something that ought to change how you read annual discounts. Its ladder discounts annual billing by more than half on the entry tier, by a bit over a quarter on the next, by about nine per cent on the third and under seven on the top one. That is not a discount that varies a little by tier; it is a discount that essentially disappears as you climb. A buyer on the entry plan is being paid substantially to commit for a year. A buyer on the top plan is being offered almost nothing for the same commitment, and should probably decline it.

Nutshell presents the same information the other way round and it is worth recognising. Its page prints a monthly per-user price beside a line telling you how much you save each month by paying annually — and never prints the annual rate itself. To know what you would actually pay you subtract one from the other. Our record does that subtraction and marks every resulting figure as derived by subtraction, so it is never mistaken for something the vendor published. It is a legitimate presentation and an unusual one, and it means the number you would compare against another vendor does not exist on the page.

Copper deserves credit that this workstream has not often been able to give. Its page claims a saving of up to twenty-six per cent for annual billing. Computed from the pairs it prints, its three tiers discount by about twenty-one, about fourteen and a half, and just over twenty-six per cent. The highest is a shade above twenty-six, so the claim is accurate and rounded down by about a tenth of a point. After vendors that overstate a discount by two and a half times and others that understate their own, a claim that is correct to the rounding is genuinely notable.

It is also worth reading what that claim does not say. 'Up to' describes the best tier only, and on this ladder the best tier is the most expensive one. The tier a small team would actually buy discounts by rather less. An accurate 'up to' is still a ceiling, and the number that applies to you is the one you compute from your own tier's pair.

Capsule CRM cannot be priced here at all, and the reason is worth stating plainly rather than leaving as a blank. Its plan prices render from script that our read did not execute, so they are recorded as absent. Supplying them from memory or from another comparison site would be precisely the fabrication this record exists to prevent, so the fields stay empty and the vendor is absent from our price comparisons rather than represented by a plausible figure.

So the sequence in this category is: ask about one-off and onboarding fees before you compare anything monthly, because at least one line here attaches a mandatory charge worth half a year of subscription. Compute the annual discount for your own tier rather than reading the headline, because on one ladder it ranges from over half to almost nothing. And where a vendor prints a saving rather than a price, do the subtraction yourself and write down the result before comparing it with anyone.