SB-05: Example 2 of 5: Construction (MarketSharp)

Part 5 of the SaaS or Build series, worked example 2 of 5. Prices checked October 2026 from the vendor's published plans and its own comparison pages.

Ask a remodeling company what runs the business and the answer is a name like MarketSharp: the CRM built for home improvement contractors, the kind of industry system from Part 3 that nobody questions because “it is made for us.”

That sentence deserves a price check, not an argument. MarketSharp is a capable tool with two decades in its trade. Here is its sheet.

The functionality specification

Lead capture from the website and lead sources, with leads distributed to sales reps. A contact and pipeline CRM shaped around in-home selling. Appointment scheduling and confirmation. Automated follow-up: email and text sequences for the leads that did not buy on the first visit, which in remodeling is most of the money. Quoting and proposals, with electronic signatures on the top plan. Job tracking from contract to completion. Reporting on close rates, sales and job costs. A QuickBooks connection so the office and the books agree.

What the rent costs

MarketSharp publishes three plans: Standard at 199 dollars a month (182 on annual billing), Pro at 349 (319), Ultimate at 499 (457). The base includes the account and one user; more users are added per plan, and the vendor's own comparison page puts year one for five users at about 6,228 dollars all in, onboarding included. Held flat, Pro runs about 21,000 dollars over five years, Ultimate about 30,000, before per-user additions as the office grows.

Two honest observations. First, MarketSharp is designed for teams of roughly one to fifteen users; beyond that it points you to a bigger sibling product, so the 75-user column from our other examples does not even exist here. The tool itself tells you where its world ends. Second, this is not the worst rent in the series. It is a mid-size, steady one, which is exactly why it survives unexamined for a decade in so many companies.

What building the equivalent takes

The specification above is a focused CRM: lead intake, pipeline stages, a scheduler, follow-up automation, a quoting flow, job status, reports. Six to ten weeks for a small senior team, shaped to the way your company actually sells, which in remodeling is never quite the template's way. The AI layer lands naturally here: follow-up messages drafted in your voice, call notes summarized into the record, stale leads resurfaced before they go cold. What you lose is real: MarketSharp's library of industry integrations and the training bundled into every plan.

The read

If your sales process is the template's process, keep renting and spend your energy on selling. If your reps work around the tool, exporting to spreadsheets to run the follow-up the way your company actually does it, you are paying rent on a system your process has already left. That workaround, not the invoice, is the signal.