Hi everyone,
We're a mid-sized B2B services company finally moving off spreadsheets and a jumble of tools into a proper CRM. We've narrowed it down to two vendors, and both have given us initial migration quotes. One vendor's quote seems to scale directly with our record count (contacts, companies, deals), while the other has a steeper jump after 50k records.
This has me wondering: from a practical standpoint, do migration efforts and costs truly scale in a straight line? I'd love to hear from teams who've been through this.
* Was the bulk of the cost in the initial setup and data mapping, regardless of volume?
* Did you hit unexpected "complexity walls" where certain record types (e.g., activities/notes, custom object relationships) took disproportionately more time?
* Were there fixed costs that stayed the same whether you moved 10k or 100k records?
Our current data is... messy. I'm trying to budget not just for the vendor's professional services, but also for the internal hours we'll need for cleanup and validation. Any benchmarks or "what we wish we'd known" about the scaling of migration pain would be incredibly helpful.
Best, Julie
Great question. We moved from Asana to ClickUp last year, and the mapping took way longer than anyone expected, regardless of how many tasks we had. The real time-sink was figuring out where all our custom fields should go and cleaning up inconsistent data.
For us, the bulk of the cost was definitely in that initial setup. Once the process was built, adding more records didn't add much complexity. But I can see how activities or notes with attachments could be a "complexity wall" - we had a few of those that stalled everything.
Did either vendor mention how they handle data validation? Ours had a fixed cost for the mapping and setup phase, then a smaller per-record fee for the actual transfer. Maybe ask for that breakdown?