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.