In the fall of 2022, our co-founder Darryl opened the monthly invoice from his team's "all-in-one" CRM. It read $18,400 for six seats. Contact add-ons. Automation credits. Webhook overages. An API tier that renewed itself. And the worst line item of all: a paid export of data they'd already entered.
The team was a twelve-person logistics outfit. They had 4,000 contacts. They were paying $1.50 per record, per year, to query their own customer list.
"We were renting our own Rolodex, and the landlord kept raising the rent. That was the moment we realized this was a product problem, not a pricing one." Darryl Pryor, co-founder & CEO
A week later, Darryl called Maya Chen, an engineer he'd worked with at Segment, and asked if she'd ever seen a CRM priced by intent rather than by metered extraction. She hadn't. Neither had anyone they knew. So in January 2023, they opened a laptop in a half-heated garage on 14th Avenue, and started writing Conduyt.
The design brief fit on one index card: One flat price. Open schema. Free exports. Forever.