Consider an email campaign asking for donations. If you donāt ask you donāt get. Iām sure most companies, including myself would toss you $100USD, which could add up substantially.
My current configuration for my company looks like this:
Joomla (Main Site)
Mautic (Client Communications)
SuiteCRM (CRM)
ClientExec (Hosting services)
Magento (Hardware sales)
Elastic Search (Data ingestion)
Grafana (Dashboard)
Iāve programmed a plugin for Joomla that connects to each via API where when a client signs up, the data is brokered into each system and creates or updates accounts and resets the passwords.
Mautic is used for powerful client segmentation into the product categories they purchase for targeted messages.
SuiteCRM, Iām still learning to get the most out of it, but for the most part is being used for project management and will be used for workflow of repeated tasks that are associated with some of our services. Group Email is the other use, which could use some major improvements.
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There have been email campaigns like what you suggest, the SuiteCRM Newsletter is sent to tens of thousands of people and includes calls for action and details about sponsoring via OpenCollective.
Regular donations are the most important kind because they generate a baseline (which is what a projects-driven company like SalesAgility lacks) and this brings security and encourages hiring more people for the product team.
How did you implement the ElasticSearch with the SuiteCRM?
How good is Grafana for reporting? Is it free and easy to integrate with SuiteCRM?
One way to attract more users and improve retention would be to offer pre-made, industry-specific customizations. These customizations could be developed by specialized consultants who already have tailored solutions. Their name and brand would appear on the first page when installing the CRM, with the system pre-configured to their specifications by default.
For example, an IT-focused customization could be labeled āCustomization by Hammer,ā while an insurance-specific version could be āCustomization by Stevens.ā You could also include other pre-made customizations already published here: SuiteCRM Downloads.
You might worry that users wonāt pay in the future if you provide these customizations upfront. However, by attracting more users, youāll ultimately grow your businessāeven if some users stick with the default customization.
This would use the actual resources and do marketing for the third party consultants, so its win win for all.
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@office interesting idea, I have thought of that, I know Salesforce does alot of that. However, Iāve done so many customizations over the years, Iāve yet to find two clients who have the same data requirements, the same integration requirements, the same sales process or the same marketing automation!
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True, it is impossible to find two clients with exact same requirements. Every client has their own way to handle and store data in the CRM. 
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You can jack into mariaDB and pull data directly or you could use the API. Iām in a rush and went the DB method but will look at API when I have time.
Grafana is an excellent graphical dashboard. Also, thereās Kibana from Elastic Search that is also very good.
Iām still in my infant stages of learning this, but my goal is to centralize my whole tech stack into elastic search and have a single pain of glass to see everything going on.
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Yes, I fully agree. The purpose is not for them to use the customization you had provided, but only to see a showcase for a indepth customization so they will use suitecrm and call you for their business customization.
So you will have more clients, suitecrm cloud will have more clients, more people will use suitecrm, and with a bigger users and the foundation/donations going the development will be faster.
This idea is only for marketing to solve the people leaving suitecrm.
Thatās a good idea 
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I couldnāt agree more on the point, that SuiteCRM needs more marketing.
Plenty of content I see here and put out by SA is very developer focused - which is nice, since it meets a big part of the audience here.
But it feels like, a CRM from developers for developers, hiding it from the sales, marketing and customer service departments of this world isnāt going to perform very well in terms of installations and adoption.
SuiteCRM should have way more use cases, ideas for (non-dev) optimizations, day to day tasks and tutorials out there. Thatās basically partly what Iām working on as well.
If there is more marketing, there are more leads coming through and there will be more budget / donations - I donāt have to explain this in a CRM forum 
The question is not about the price but about the money lost. So even if I pay 100k to hubspot but I have more functionalities I make 1 mil. With suitecrm I dont pay so much but I make 500k. So in the end I lost more money.
So, I chose suiteCRM as the best option to get away from Hubspot and the like. As noted here, it is not complete but it is a great foundation for companies that can handle the technical overhead. I pair it with N8N, Mautic and Strapi as well to round out the differences with Hubspot.
The biggest challenge that I have seen that keeps people moving to platforms like Hubspot is that, these systems can require significant overhead where Hubspot doesnāt have hardly any overhead.
Those costs add up and can easily outpace what you are paying Hubspot. I think the best solution for this doesnāt actually require anything additional from suiteCRM but could provide them and others with additional revenue.
Shared hosting platforms have the advantage of spreading costs across many companies. We can easily take that advantage away from them by forming āco-opsā that allow us to share hosting.
Think about this, I can run suiteCRM, Mautic, N8N, and Strapi in a container environment on azure behind an nginx ingress using the lowest resources they have in production and still have resources left over to run at least one additional instance in the same shared environment.
Without putting the extra work in to convert some of the functionality to being cloud native all of that functionality costs me around $50-$70 per month. After making it more cloud native I believe I could get that cost closer to $30/month.
Hosting multiple companies in the shared environment could allow us to get that average down to $10 to $15 per month, per company on the lower end. This configuration allows each business to only pay for what they use, and actually scale with the business. We could probably get that price lower if we add in a scale to zero option that works well.
This however creates a new issue, how do we support the āco-op platformā? Well, maybe we dont, Maybe what we do instead is set up āfeature bountiesā that allows companies using this platform to only contribute to financially building a āfeature potā, We pass that back to the company who best matches that core product, If they are willing to build it, they get the pot, otherwise we open it to the rest of the involved platforms and then open it up to anyone to develop using the feature pot as a reward for contributing. Opensource doesnāt have to be unpaid, it just needs to be organized.
This would :
- prioritize most wanted features by customer
- prioritize most wanted features by opensource project
- prioritize native integration of new features
- Encourage faster/better development
- Provide a new revenue stream to everyone involved
- ease costs on companies trying to do marketing, especially smaller businesses.
I have started creating a version of what I have put together that is reusable to do something like this. I just got the initial version working last night and open sourced it.
Thatās awesome. Did you pushed it to your GitHub account?
yeah This is mostly up to date.
MarketForge/azure-deploy at master Ā· ajwtech/MarketForge
I should clarify I have not actually added a license. I would like to use MIT but I just need to review it to make sure I can first.
For a Customer of mine the main point they moved from Salesforce (apart from saving thousands of Dollars) was the reports, me and my colleague made a custom report that would mimic the same they viewād on Salesforce and made our Install in a way they would like more than Salesforce even gone a step further in making a Custom Userportal for Accounts to Login and see Records.I think it depends on what the customer is looking to achieve with the SuiteCRM, not only the cost saving, but i think (viewing from a customer perspective ) that after a while using it , it can be āboringā. Just my opinion tho i donāt feel this way at all.
Yeah, that really is a blocker, cuz there is so much a community can do but thatās different than having a Full Time Developer for SA, I am working with my board to be able to make a donation to help.
Also answering to the reply by @ceopx i dont think an email campaign would be a solution because donations should come from the heart, not from an campaign asking for money.
Donāt think ābegging for spare changeā would be a great tatic
I love that idea, gives a new user options to choose customizations from and a % of the purchase goes do SA, a win win solution in my opinion. Devs get more visibility and SA get a baseline to start. Great Example @office
In my opinion most people like flashy shiny thingsā¦ IF we can get IFRAMES to work out the box on suitecrm8 it would help alot,i personally use suitecrm for my real estate business and using google maps/streetview, zillow iframes etc is essentialā¦
not just in legacy settings; Also adding sms,phone integrations out the box would help without the need of extra paid modules.
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