The CRM market is still priced for the old cost of building software That’s the whole thing. Everything else is just consequences. I think 2025 was the last year where the big CRM players could still show clean, impressive numbers and have everyone nod along. And to be clear, some of them did well. Pipedrive reportedly passed $200M in revenue. That’s real. Respect. HubSpot and Salesforce have also kept growing revenue and assets. Their 2024 numbers were solid, and 2025 will probably look fine on paper once the reports land. But the mood has changed. Public market sentiment around large SaaS platforms has been rough lately, even when revenue keeps going up. I’m not making a moral point here. Just observing that growth alone isn’t enough anymore. The belief part is weaker. Development costs dropped. SaaS pricing didn’t. Building software is still expensive. Anyone paying on-demand for models like Opus 4.6 knows this very well. At scale, AI coding burns cash fast. But compared to five years ago? It’s cheaper. It’s faster. Teams are smaller. Shipping is tighter. That changes SaaS math whether we like it or not. Customers feel this already. They look at pricing and compare it to what a sharp, focused team can now build with modern tooling and AI support. And they ask a fair question. Why am I paying like this still?? The legacy problem nobody likes to talk about The old giants aren’t slow because they’re dumb. They’re slow because they carry a lot. Org charts. Sales machinery. Partner programs. Long roadmaps that made total sense in a higher-cost world. Expectations layered on expectations. Cutting prices means cutting costs hard. That kind of streamlining is already happening, and it’s not fun for anyone involved. Competing with AI-native products while dragging all that weight is brutal. Speed matters more now. Iteration matters more than polish. Slides don’t save you anymore. i’ve seen this before. When I worked in games, companies kept trying to recreate yesterday’s MMORPG or DOTA success, even though player expectations had moved on. The teams were talented. The plans looked fine. The ground had just shifted under them. Same pattern. Different industry. If you run or buy a CRM, this is the real question Not whether the vendor is big. Not whether they have nice logos on the site. Are you paying for software priced on the old cost of building, or the new one? That answer matters more than most feature lists right now. Modern CRM pricing only works if it’s built for today’s economics.