I’m trying to sanity-check the market price for a substantial custom build.

The client is a small European online higher-education provider with tens of thousands of historical contacts and hundreds of new leads per month.

Their current setup is spread across HubSpot, Mailchimp, Zapier, Tawk, Typeform, Google Sheets, WordPress, scheduling, telephony, and several lead providers.

The founder and I agreed on two connected products:

1. Fully custom CRM

• Unified contacts, leads, sources, programmes, stages, ownership, and consent
• Complete activity history, tasks, assignments, and tickets
• Native application forms and scheduling
• Custom automation replacing the relevant Zapier workflows
• Human messaging workspace and email integration
• Google Sheets synchronization and reporting
• User permissions and audit history
• Migration away from the relevant parts of the existing stack

2. Fully self-hosted AI system

• Custom, fine-tuned, self-hosted LLM with no external model API
• Inbound and outbound WhatsApp texting
• Inbound and outbound AI calling using the same lead context
• Image and voice-message comprehension
• Multilingual conversations
• Institutional knowledge base
• Lead qualification and long-term follow-up
• Direct CRM access for reading context, updating leads, creating tasks, and scheduling
• Human handoff with a conversation summary
• Testing, monitoring, and safety controls

The work also includes the backend, database, EU hosting, data migration, staged rollout, staff training, and launch.

I know an exact estimate would require proper discovery. I’m only looking for a realistic market ballpark:

• What would you quote for the complete build, migration, and setup?
• What monthly retainer would you charge for hosting, monitoring, maintenance, support, and ongoing improvements?

Please mention whether you’re answering as a solo consultant or agency, and keep external Meta, email, and telephony usage fees separate.

I’m deliberately leaving out my own estimate so I don’t anchor the answers. Thanks!