We're a small SaaS in the property/hospitality space, team of 8 with around 4-5 of us split between sales and customer onboarding/support. The goal is to run the whole customer lifecycle in one place and make the experience cohesive and holistic end to end. We're scaling quite fast so ideally we want it to be scalable and future proof as we GTM.

We previously looked at Zoho but found it a bit too clunky to use. Attio is nice but there's no ticketing/helpdesk. Hubspot looks good and cohesive but is too expensive for us right now. Our setup is currently spreadsheets and a vibe coded frontend form that stores in a basic database made from Claude Code in ~2 hours or so haha

What we are looking for:

- A pipeline that drives the process/SOP. Our VAs shouldn't be able to skip stages or move a deal forward until the required steps are done. Mandatory fields, gated stage transitions, that sort of thing (nice to have but not essential)

- A support desk / ticketing built in. Would really rather not pay for and babysit a separate help desk if the CRM can handle it. Ideally this is included and any bugs discovered from the support desk can be integrated and forwarded to Linear so our Engineering team can work on it

- Workflow automation. Follow-up reminders, auto-creating tasks, a nudge when a deal's gone quiet. Time-based alerts (e.g. no contact in 14 days, remind team to message them), auto-created tasks etc

- Some way to track onboarding tasks/checklists per customer.

- Decent integrations, or at least a proper API. We use Calendly, Stripe, Slack, WhatsApp for notifications, Linear (devs live in there). We'd also want to push our own product usage data into the CRM via API. Also APIs to hook and ingest external webforms into our CRM - we use Claude Code quite a lot and right now we have a vibe coded front end webform which we use to track our client leads

- Our main communications will be between email and WhatsApp. If the CRM can cover these and gather context from both and store to the same customer that would be amazing too. Currently looking at unified inbox solutions which includes those two above and also linkedin, instagram etc. to manage our customer funnels

On budget: we're small, so Salesforce-Enterprise pricing or a $30k implementation is a hard no. Hoping it can be kept under $250 a month or so!

So really, the question is whether there's an all-in-one that does deals pipeline + onboarding support + automation + Helpdesk without costing a fortune, or whether everyone just ends up running a CRM plus a separate help desk and gluing them together anyway. Keen to hear what you're actually running, and just as useful, what you'd tell me to stay away from.

Bit of a big spiel so thank you for anyone that has the time to reply to this! 😄

We're a small SaaS in the property/hospitality space, team of 8 with around 4-5 of us split between sales and customer onboarding/support. The goal is to run the whole customer lifecycle in one place and make the experience cohesive and holistic end to end. We're scaling quite fast so ideally we want it to be scalable and future proof as we GTM.

We previously looked at Zoho but found it a bit too clunky to use. Attio is nice but there's no ticketing/helpdesk. Hubspot looks good and cohesive but is too expensive for us right now. Our setup is currently spreadsheets and a vibe coded frontend form that stores in a basic database made from Claude Code in ~2 hours or so haha

What we are looking for:

- A pipeline that drives the process/SOP. Our VAs shouldn't be able to skip stages or move a deal forward until the required steps are done. Mandatory fields, gated stage transitions, that sort of thing (nice to have but not essential)

- A support desk / ticketing built in. Would really rather not pay for and babysit a separate help desk if the CRM can handle it. Ideally this is included and any bugs discovered from the support desk can be integrated and forwarded to Linear so our Engineering team can work on it

- Workflow automation. Follow-up reminders, auto-creating tasks, a nudge when a deal's gone quiet. Time-based alerts (e.g. no contact in 14 days, remind team to message them), auto-created tasks etc

- Some way to track onboarding tasks/checklists per customer.

- Decent integrations, or at least a proper API. We use Calendly, Stripe, Slack, WhatsApp for notifications, Linear (devs live in there). We'd also want to push our own product usage data into the CRM via API. Also APIs to hook and ingest external webforms into our CRM - we use Claude Code quite a lot and right now we have a vibe coded front end webform which we use to track our client leads

- Our main communications will be between email and WhatsApp. If the CRM can cover these and gather context from both and store to the same customer that would be amazing too. Currently looking at unified inbox solutions which includes those two above and also linkedin, instagram etc. to manage our customer funnels

On budget: we're small, so Salesforce-Enterprise pricing or a $30k implementation is a hard no. Hoping it can be kept under $250 a month or so!

So really, the question is whether there's an all-in-one that does deals pipeline + onboarding support + automation + Helpdesk without costing a fortune, or whether everyone just ends up running a CRM plus a separate help desk and gluing them together anyway. Keen to hear what you're actually running, and just as useful, what you'd tell me to stay away from.

Bit of a big spiel so thank you for anyone that has the time to reply to this! 😄