Salesforce has spent nearly three decades securing its position as the enterprise CRM software, commanding a quarter of the global market – beating its four closest competitors combined. But a growing chorus of executives see an opportunity to test whether that dominance is unshakeable as it appears to be.
Instead of paying six or seven figures a year for a very complicated platform – with a number of features you’ll likely never use – why not vibe-code your way into a leaner, cheaper version of exactly the same thing, for a fraction of the cost? A string of founders and executives have gone public with claims of doing just that. But can vibe-coding really be the end of Salesforce?
‘We Vibe-Coded a CRM: $600k to 0’
The CEO of a health insurance company claims to have cancelled his $600,000 Salesforce contract after vibe-coding a CRM in two months. Fred Turner, Founder of Curative, told the 20VC with Harry Stebbings podcast that his company runs an internal CRM which is “working better” and is “more integrated”, and reduced his Salesforce bill to “zero”.
When asked if it was worth the engineering hours to vibe-code and then maintain an internal CRM, Turner said: “The maintenance is definitely one of the most challenging pieces. I agree with that.” But, he added, for most businesses of any reasonable scale, it was worth it.
Turner is not the first executive to go on record about vibe-coding a CRM. In February, AI app builder Lovable posted a story about how Gabe Larsen, CRO at AI agent company Atonom, cut his business’s $40,000 Salesforce bill to $1,200 with “no functionality lost”.
“Does it have every bell and whistle of HubSpot or Salesforce? No. Does it need to? Also no. It’s purpose-built for how they actually operate,” Lovable wrote in their blog post.
It should be stressed that Lovable is the vendor that helped build the replacement, so their own material on the matter should be taken with a pinch of skepticism.
But it doesn’t end there, either. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported on this phenomenon of some small and midsize companies vibe-coding their own CRM software. Bill Schonbrun, chief operating officer of 65-person water treatment company CarboNet, said that he chose to build his own CRM with the aid of AI.
Schonbrun said: “We tried Salesforce and it was OK. We did all kinds of customizations, but never got to the place where it did exactly what we wanted it to do.”
A Salesforce spokesperson told the WSJ at the time: “Vibe coding CRM without enterprise-grade protections for business data is a high-stakes gamble that [small and medium businesses] can’t risk.”
In January, former CEO of Amazon’s consumer operations Derek Clark, who is now Founder and CEO of Auger, revealed in a LinkedIn post that he had a “wildly productive” weekend, having built a custom CRM “between last night and today”.
“The CRM one surprised me most,” Clark wrote. “We tried configuring an off-the-shelf tool for our cycle. Too many fields we don’t need, missing the ones we do, forces a pipeline flow that doesn’t match reality. Spent more time fighting the tool than using it.
“So I just built what we needed. Took a night and a morning.”
What About the Big Fish?
More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies are using Salesforce, which still holds around 24% of the global CRM market – which is more than its next four competitors combined.
If you’re tempted to write this statistic off as just inertia from previous years, it’s worth considering that even Anthropic is not vibe-coding its own CRM. The company, which arguably is best positioned to vibe-code its own internal software, is looking to hire Salesforce Developers.
We would also do well to remember the Klarna controversy last year, when CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski announced that the company had “shut down Salesforce” as one of its SaaS providers.
Siemiatkowski later wrote on X that he was “tremendously embarrassed” by the whole situation and felt his initial comments were widely misinterpreted.
It had initially been believed that Klarna shut down all of its SaaS providers in an attempt to fully utilize AI, namely ChatGPT, and organize company data more efficiently. But Klarna found that much of its company knowledge – employee data, performance metrics, company goals, etc. – was all spread across too many different SaaS tools.
Enterprise features like auditing, versioning, and access control were also identified as fragmented. In order to eliminate the silos of information, Klarna started consolidating its systems, leading to the “shutdown” of Salesforce.
“The side consequence of this was the liquidation of SaaS. Not all of them, but a lot of them,” Siemiatkowski explained. “We did not replace SaaS with an LLM, and storing CRM data in an LLM would have its limitations. But we developed an internal tech stack using Neo4j (a Swedish graph database company) to start bringing data = knowledge together.”
It should be stressed that many of the companies vibe-coding their own CRMs are smaller-sized businesses, and this makes a lot of sense. There is a premium on budget when you’re at a smaller size. If you can save a five-figure sum by swapping out the market-leading CRM for something which is kind of as good, but is radically cheaper, then those kinds of corners are arguably worth cutting, for a company with fewer than 50 people.
Martín Migoya, CEO of tech consulting firm Globant, said that some companies are starting to use AI-generated software to replace SaaS products, but urged caution with this, adding: “Creating enterprise-class things is tough.”
Though this isn’t a homogeneous thing. It was recently reported that Starbucks is developing in-house tools using AI which could replace some software it currently buys from Microsoft and IBM. These alternatives are said to include a system that tracks inventory and a tool that manages maintenance.
This is pretty worrying for Salesforce, right?
Salesforce’s View
Salesforce is not letting these viewpoints go unchallenged. In a March 2026 article titled Thinking of Vibe Coding Your CRM? Here’s The True Cost, the company warned against ‘Frankensteining’ your own software because it “quickly creates a tangled web that may not be scalable”.
According to Salesforce, vibe-coding CRM functions lead to accumulated technical debt; fragile data architecture; security and compliance gaps; integration roadblocks; and lack of official support. “If your vibe-coded workflow breaks during a peak sales period, there’s no help desk to call – leaving your team stranded until you can manually debug the AI-generated logic,” the company writes.
And, Salesforce says, each time you choose a shortcut to workflows, you’re effectively taking out a “high-interest loan on your future productivity”.
Addressing the SMB issue in particular, the company says that small businesses often think they can just fix the messy parts later, but “later rarely comes” before the system breaks. Technical debt grows until the team spends more time fixing errors than talking to prospects.
Final Thoughts
Can AI build a CRM? The current evidence would appear to suggest that it can. But there are so many additional considerations. What happens when the employees who vibe-coded the ‘Frankenstein’ CRM leave? Who handles security incidents, integrations, and regulatory changes? If you have years of accumulated data and workflows, do you have to start afresh?
Vibe-coding a solution might get you something that “works” on the surface, and if you’re a small business with only a few requirements from your CRM, it might be an option for you. But it might be a very long time indeed before we see Fortune 500 companies vibe-coding their own CRMs.
