Greenleaf Replaced Salesforce and Saves $100,000 a Year

Dave Codrea runs a real estate firm, not a software company. He had never built an app. Then he watched another business owner build one live at a networking event, in about 20 minutes, and thought, "I can do that."

His firm, Greenleaf Management in Atlanta, has since replaced Salesforce with a CRM he built himself. He told The Information it saves about $100,000 a year and costs about $300 a month to maintain. Here is what he built, what it cost, and what we still don't know.

A note on sources before the numbers. The savings and the running cost come from Codrea's interview with The Information in July 2026. The build time and build cost come from Replit's customer story about Greenleaf, which Replit wrote to sell its product, so we label those figures as Replit's.

Why Did Greenleaf Leave Salesforce?

Greenleaf buys real estate that is out of favor and turns it around: restaurants during COVID, office buildings more recently. Codrea told Replit his customers change every 18 months or so, and most software fits one industry, not a dozen. "Most of the time I buy software and I use like 10% of it."

Salesforce was the clearest case. "I just need to keep track of who I've spoken to, who's on our distribution list," he said. Making Salesforce fit would have meant outside consultants and, in his words, "tens of thousands of dollars." So for a while the team went back to Google Sheets, which the team wasn't thrilled about.

Salesforce lists its sales CRM plans per user per month on its pricing page. Greenleaf hasn't shared what its own Salesforce bill was.

How Long Did It Take to Build?

Replit's story says Codrea built the CRM in about 25 hours, for $150 to $200 in tool costs. "I've never developed anything," he told Replit. "I'm not pulling up code and editing it."

The Information reported he used Claude Code alongside Replit. Neither source says how many people helped, or how many hours went into changes after launch. Count those hours as a real cost, even when the tool bill is small.

What Does It Save?

Codrea told The Information the switch saves about $100,000 a year. The new app costs about $300 a month to maintain: $300 × 12 = $3,600 a year.

It isn't clear whether the $100,000 is before or after that $3,600. Either way, running the new system costs under 4% of what it saves ($3,600 ÷ $100,000 = 3.6%).

One thing a careful reader will notice: the numbers don't match across sources. Replit's page headlines "$100k+ saved," and its write-up counts that as building costs avoided, plus "hundreds of thousands" in yearly software fees. We use the number Codrea gave a reporter, about $100,000 a year, because it is the more conservative one.

Is Greenleaf the Only One?

No. The same Information report covered five small companies, with 20 to 70 people each, that ended Salesforce or HubSpot contracts over six months for apps they built with AI tools. They cut their software costs by 40% to 80%, as summarized by PYMNTS.

What the Other Side Says

Salesforce President Srini Tallapragada told investors that companies "all try to do the do-it-yourself, and they're realizing that you can't vibe code your way to enterprise reliability and security." Bobby Mukherjee, CEO of the IT consulting firm Loka, told The Information that replacing these platforms "pulls engineering attention away from things that actually differentiate the business."

Both points are fair for large companies with complex needs. Greenleaf's answer is that it was paying for a large platform while using a small part of it.

What Greenleaf Pays for Now

Greenleaf didn't list the tools it kept. What it pays for now is the builders themselves, Replit and Anthropic's Claude, inside that roughly $300 a month. Codrea told Replit he is working through 20 to 40 other subscriptions, one at a time. One example: he said DocuSign went from nearly free to $25,000 a year, and that mailing a letter would be cheaper.

For a contact list and a deal pipeline built around how his team works, Greenleaf's choice was "Build it." For larger sales teams with heavy reporting, forecasting or a big app marketplace, our default for CRM is still "Build part of it." The custom CRM guide covers when each one fits.

What We Still Don't Know

• What Greenleaf paid Salesforce, Entrata and Yardi each year, separately.
• Whether the $100,000 a year is before or after the $300 a month to run it.
• How many hours a month Codrea spends keeping it running, and who fixes it if he is away.
• How the data moved out of Salesforce, and whether anything was left behind.

If Greenleaf shares more, we'll update this story.

When This Won't Work for You

• Nobody inside the company can own it. At Greenleaf, a partner built it and makes the changes. Without that person, the tool stops improving.
• You rely on the whole platform: forecasting, territory rules, a big app marketplace, an admin team. That is a different job from tracking contacts.
• Your CRM holds regulated data, such as health or payment records, that needs audits and access controls you would now own.
• Your bill is small. A few hundred dollars a month may not be worth any hours at all.

Does This Apply to You?

Run this check on your own business:

1. List what your team actually does in your CRM each week. If it fits on one page, that's a good sign.
2. Pull the yearly bill for your CRM and any tools that overlap with it.
3. Name the person who would build and own a replacement, and how many hours a month they can give it.
4. Check your renewal date, and give yourself at least 90 days before it to try a version.

See what other teams have built on our build stories page.