Contents
- Every business that relies on a CRM eventually faces a migration decision.
- The Stealth Labz operation ran on Konnektive CRM for customer data and order management, supplemented by five additional SaaS vendors for affiliate tracking, email, marketing automation, communications, and social management.
- The migration strategy followed three phases:
- If you are considering a CRM migration, the standard advice is to pick a new SaaS vendor and hire a systems integrator.
The Setup
Every business that relies on a CRM eventually faces a migration decision. The CRM vendor raises prices. The platform stops evolving. The business outgrows the tool's limitations. Or — most commonly — the business needs capabilities the CRM was never designed to provide: identity resolution, revenue attribution from first touch to lifetime value, or unified data across multiple sales channels.
The problem: CRM migration is painful. Your entire customer history lives inside that system. Every lead record, every transaction, every interaction log. According to Gartner's 2024 CRM Migration Survey, 60% of CRM migration projects exceed their original timeline, and 52% exceed their original budget. The average mid-market CRM migration takes 6 to 12 months and costs $50,000 to $250,000 when using a systems integrator.
These numbers assume you are migrating from one SaaS CRM to another SaaS CRM. They do not account for the more ambitious path: migrating off SaaS entirely and onto infrastructure you own.
What the Data Shows
The Stealth Labz operation ran on Konnektive CRM for customer data and order management, supplemented by five additional SaaS vendors for affiliate tracking, email, marketing automation, communications, and social management. Total combined spend across all six vendors: $19,909 over 28 months. Konnektive alone accounted for $9,497 of that.
Source: CS19, 28_month_financial. QB-verified vendor transactions.
Before the migration, a legacy version of the platform existed. It ran from July through November 2025 on a separate server. That legacy system proved the concept:
| Metric | Legacy System (Jul-Nov 2025) |
|---|---|
| Leads processed | 16,259 |
| Webhook events logged | 46,878 |
| Database tables | 22 |
| API integrations | 4 |
| Active period | 120 days |
Source: CS19. MySQL-verified data extracted via root SSH access, February 2, 2026.
The legacy system worked. It also hit its ceiling. 22 database tables could not support identity resolution, enrichment, audience segmentation, or lead-level revenue attribution. The architecture was a webhook-based lead capture tool, not a Customer Data Platform.
PRJ-01 replaced both the legacy system and all six SaaS vendors. The migration delivered a 38x increase in processing capacity:
| Metric | Legacy (Jul-Nov 2025) | PRJ-01 (Oct 2025-Jan 2026) | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leads processed | 16,259 | 616,543 | 38x |
| Database tables | 22 | 135 | 6x |
| API integrations | 4 | 20 (12 inbound, 8 outbound) | 5x |
| Contact points resolved | None | 958,937 | New capability |
| Transactions processed | None | 75,125 | New capability |
| Identity resolution | None | Three-tier (UUID, email, phone) | New capability |
Source: CS19, portal_stealth_locked_values. Production database snapshot as of January 2026.
The migration was not a lift-and-shift. It was a complete rebuild with data ingestion from 12 inbound sources: Konnektive, Shopify, WooCommerce, Everflow, CAKE, Zapier, Waypoint, BobGo, Klaviyo, Dripcel, Stripe, and CSV uploads. Every lead that entered the system went through identity resolution — three-tier matching on UUID, then email, then phone — to create unified profiles.
According to Informatica's 2024 Data Migration Report, the average data migration project has a 38% data quality error rate during the first migration pass. The PRJ-01 approach avoided this by building ingestion pipelines that clean and resolve data at entry, rather than migrating dirty data and cleaning it afterward.
The build cost for the entire migration:
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| PRJ-01 build cost (sweep) | $16,800 |
| Operating expenses (Oct 2025-Jan 2026) | $3,855 |
| Total | $20,655 |
Source: 28_month_financial. Build cost from Infrastructure Build sheet. Operating expenses from STLP project sheet.
Compare that to Gartner's benchmark of $50,000 to $250,000 for a standard CRM migration. PRJ-01 did not just migrate data from one CRM to another. It consolidated six separate data sources into a unified Customer Data Platform with capabilities none of the original vendors provided.
How It Works
The migration strategy followed three phases:
Phase 1: Build the new system while the old system runs. PRJ-01 was developed from October 8 through January 31, 2026 (74 active development days). During this period, the SaaS vendors remained operational. No service interruption. No rushed cutover.
Phase 2: Ingest data from all sources into the new system. Rather than a single point-to-point migration (old CRM to new CRM), PRJ-01 was designed to ingest from 12 sources simultaneously. Leads from Konnektive, e-commerce data from Shopify and WooCommerce, affiliate data from Everflow and CAKE, email engagement from Klaviyo — all funneled into one system with identity resolution running on every record.
Phase 3: Validate at production scale, then decommission. The new system was tested against production data (616,543 leads, 75,125 transactions, 958,937 contact points) before the SaaS vendors were turned off. By January 2026, the monthly SaaS cost dropped to $0.
Source: CS19, 28_month_financial. Cost trajectory shows SaaS spend declining from $1,715 in October 2025 to $499 in December 2025 to $0 in January 2026.
The identity resolution layer was the critical technical piece. Without it, the 616,543 leads would have been 616,543 disconnected records, the same fragmentation that existed across six SaaS vendors. The three-tier matching system (UUID first, then email, then phone) ensured that a customer appearing in Konnektive, Shopify, and Klaviyo became one unified profile in PRJ-01.
What This Means for Business Operators
If you are considering a CRM migration, the standard advice is to pick a new SaaS vendor and hire a systems integrator. That solves the immediate problem but creates the same long-term dependencies: your data in someone else's system, your processes adapted to their workflow, your growth constrained by their roadmap.
The alternative — migrating to owned infrastructure — requires more upfront effort but produces a fundamentally different outcome. You own the data. You own the logic. You control the roadmap. The ongoing cost is hosting ($825/month for the entire Stealth Labz portfolio) instead of subscription fees ($1,565/month for six vendors).
The Stealth Labz migration processed 616,543 leads from 12 sources, resolved 958,937 contact points through identity matching, and unified everything into 135 database tables — for $20,655 total. The monthly operating cost dropped from $6,312 to $825. The business now owns every record, every attribution chain, and every customer profile permanently.
Related: [C5_S104 — Why Unified Data Infrastructure Changes Everything] | [C5_S111 — 135 Database Tables: What a Production Customer Data Platform Actually Looks Like] | [C5_S105 — SaaS Vendor Lock-In: The Business Risk Nobody Talks About]
References
- Gartner (2024). "CRM Migration Survey." Migration project overrun rates (60% exceed timeline, 52% exceed budget) and cost benchmarks ($50,000-$250,000).
- Informatica (2024). "Data Migration Report." Data quality error rate benchmarks (38% average on first migration pass).
- Keating, M.G. (2026). "Case Study: The PRJ-01 Product Story." Stealth Labz. Read case study