[mauriziocalo]

+1. And I'd add to that that sometimes there's significant work in the pre-buy phase as well:

- Researching what your options are / what's already out there.

- Comparing different alternatives.

- "Hopping on a call" with a sales rep to get a product demo (there's this super annoying trend where many SaaS companies' landing pages don't explain what they do and the only option they give is to "schedule a demo").

For CRUD-like internal tools or simple 3rd party integrations, my experience has been that it's often much faster (typically < 1 hour) to build a production-ready app on Retool (https://retool.com) than it is to even get started with SaaS vendors.

[lumberjack24]

For CRUD internal tools, I'd still consider taking a look at other software vendors in the space. Everyone is moving so fast really.

- https://www.forestadmin.com // Fastest way to build self-hosted admin panels on top of SQL (Postgres, MySQL...) and Mongo databases

- https://www.appsmith.com // Open source alternative to retool

- https://www.internal.io // A no-code alternative to all the above

- https://www.basedash.com // Very spreadsheet like XP, YC20 startup