Unpopular opinion: Paying for Salesforce is just paying for your own data back.

I've been looking at CRM costs for a project, and Salesforce quotes are… intense. The common defense is "you're paying for the platform."

But what if we're mostly paying for access and structure to the data *we* put in? The custom objects, fields, and workflows we build define the value. The API to extract our own data is a paid feature.

Has anyone done a cost breakdown comparing raw storage/compute costs versus Salesforce's per-seat pricing? I'm curious about real contract specifics.

Are there cheaper alternatives where you own the data layer outright, and just pay for the interface/automation logic? Looking for concrete examples, maybe with Python/Postgres stacks.