Salesforce CPQ Alternatives for B2B SaaS: Build vs. Buy
Legacy CPQ implementations cost £100k+/year, take 12 months to deploy, and force your business to adapt to their rigid architecture. There is a better way to quote, price, and close.
The Bloated Legacy Tech Stack
Tools like Salesforce CPQ, DealHub, and Conga were built for a different era. They were designed to serve broad markets with one-size-fits-all quoting logic. For scaling B2B SaaS companies with evolving pricing models, they create more friction than they solve.
The pattern is predictable:
- Excessive total cost of ownership — Licensing fees are just the start. Add external consultants for configuration, dedicated admins for maintenance, and SI partners for every structural change. The true cost of enterprise CPQ regularly exceeds £100k/yr before you've quoted a single deal.
- Implementation fatigue — Deployments stretch to 6-12 months as teams spend weeks mapping out edge cases, approval chains, and pricing rules that the platform wasn't designed to handle natively. By the time it's live, the business has already changed.
- Rigidity — When your pricing model changes, the system breaks. Multi-year ramps, usage-based components, hybrid structures — every deviation from the platform's assumptions requires workarounds that compound into technical debt.
The real cost isn't the licence. It's the compounding drag on your sales cycle, your ability to iterate on pricing, and the hours your team spends working around the tool instead of through it.
Architected by an Operator, Not a Vendor
I design custom, AI-driven CPQ and billing alternatives for B2B SaaS companies. Because I have owned quoting systems in production environments — from architecture through daily operation — I know exactly where enterprise CPQ breaks down and why.
The difference is structural. Instead of forcing your sales team into a clunky UI built for someone else's commercial model, I build systems that fit your exact workflow: your pricing logic, your approval chains, your deal structures.
Legacy CPQ Platforms
Salesforce CPQ, DealHub, Conga, Subskribe
Built for broad markets. Configuration-heavy. Requires dedicated admins and external partners. Pricing changes and structural updates move at the vendor's pace, not yours.
Typical annual cost: £100k+ (licence + admin + consulting)
Custom AI-Built Alternatives
Architected by RevOps On-Demand
Built around your specific deal structures, pricing logic, and approval workflows. Owned by your team. No per-seat licensing. Evolves as your commercial model changes, without consultant dependencies.
Typical annual saving: £100k+ in eliminated SaaS spend
When your Head of Sales wants to test a new pricing tier or your Finance team needs a different revenue recognition structure, you don't wait in a vendor's feature roadmap. You change it.
£100k+/Year in Saved SaaS Spend. And That's Just the Start.
Eliminating the enterprise CPQ licence is the most visible saving. But the downstream impact on your revenue operations is where the real value compounds:
- Faster sales cycles — Quotes are generated in minutes, not days. Pricing changes ship in hours, not months. Your sales team stops waiting on tools and starts closing deals.
- Full commercial agility — New pricing tiers, bundled offerings, usage-based components — your system evolves with your commercial strategy instead of constraining it.
- Eliminated vendor dependency — No more per-seat licensing, no more consultant fees for configuration changes, no more waiting on a vendor's product roadmap to fix what's broken.
Nicholas Gollop has architected and operated CPQ systems in production, from architecture through daily operation. That first-hand experience informs whether building makes sense for your business, or whether optimising what you have is the smarter move.
Knowing What to Build, Buy, and Leave Alone.
Let's discuss your quoting workflows and see if a custom architecture makes sense for your business.
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