What it is
A thought experiment: what would a CRM look like if it were built from the ground up to be
self-hosted and vibe-coded—evolved continuously through
conversational AI tooling rather than locked behind a vendor's release cycle? Built on Laravel
+ PHP, it's the kind of stack where a single person (or small team) can own the whole thing,
read every line, and reshape it on a whim.
The second, equally deliberate goal: low switching costs and high familiarity
for anyone coming from a classic enterprise CRM. If you've administered Salesforce, MS Dynamics,
or SAP Sales Cloud, the mental model should map over almost immediately—objects, fields,
records, related lists, page layouts, pipelines, and stages all where you'd expect them.
Why these two goals
The big enterprise CRMs are extraordinarily capable, but they trade away ownership: you rent the
platform, you live inside its extensibility model, and switching later is famously painful. The
premise here is to keep the shape that makes those platforms productive—the metadata-driven
data model, the configurability, the familiar admin concepts—while putting it on a stack you fully
control and can let AI evolve freely.
"Familiarity" isn't just nostalgia—it's the lever that makes the switching cost low. A custom object
behaves like a custom object. A stage-based opportunity pipeline works like you'd expect. Bulk edits,
list views, and field-level configuration feel borrowed-from-home, so migrating off an incumbent
doesn't mean relearning how to think about your data.
The personal angle
I've spent a lot of hands-on time working in, administering, and integrating with
Salesforce, MS Dynamics, and SAP Sales Cloud. Tinker CRM is partly an exercise in distilling what
actually makes those platforms feel good to administer—and what's just incidental complexity—then
rebuilding the good parts on a stack that's a joy to vibe-code against.