Small Firms Abandon Expensive Software Contracts for Custom AI Tools
A growing number of small businesses are ditching expensive software contracts with companies like Salesforce and HubSpot in favor of custom AI tools that cost pennies on the dollar.
One such company is Greenleaf Management, a real estate firm in Atlanta that replaced its $100,000-per-year contract with Entrata and Yardi by building a bespoke CRM using Replit and Anthropic's Claude Code. The result: an annual savings of roughly $100,000.
The trend is not limited to Greenleaf Management. A 45-person startup based in Utah, Atonom, swapped its $40,000-per-year Salesforce contract for a CRM built with Lovable, a competing AI development tool, and is expecting to pay just $1,200 per year.
Gartner has put a number on the threat to established vendors: $234 billion, roughly 20% of total enterprise application software spend, is exposed to agentic AI-driven replacement by 2030. Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, and Workday have begun shifting toward consumption-based and outcome-based pricing models.