The Private Alternative to Per-Seat CRM and Team Subscriptions

Most Singapore teams pay per seat for a CRM, a project tool, a team chat, and a stack of subscriptions around them, with the data scattered across vendors. Projecto is a self-hosted alternative that runs on a private AI server you rent from MT Labs. Unlimited users at a flat cost, and the contact data stays in Singapore on your own infrastructure.

The problem: every new hire is another invoice

The per-seat model became standard because it works for vendors. Each person you add to a subscription CRM is another monthly line item. The project board, the team chat, and the document workspace use the same pricing. A ten-person team usually runs five or six of these, all charged per head, all recurring forever.

For a growing Singapore SME, the arithmetic gets uncomfortable quickly. Doubling headcount roughly doubles the software bill, even when the actual workload has not changed in the same proportion. Cancelling a seat to save money creates friction inside the team. Annual plans save a few percent and lock you in.

The harder problem is where the data lives. Your customer pipeline sits on one cloud CRM. Your internal documents sit on another vendor’s storage. Your team conversations sit on a third. For a company taking PDPA seriously, that is three external custodians of personal data, each with their own privacy posture, none of them on local infrastructure.

There is also the quieter cost of fragmentation. People look up a contact in the CRM, switch to the chat tool for the history, jump to the email thread, then check the project board. Context lives in pieces because the tools were never designed to be one system.

The approach: rent one private server, get the suite

Projecto runs on the private AI server you rent from MT Labs. The same machine hosts the other tools in the suite, so the CRM sits next to your AI chat platform, your image generator, your video review app, and your dictation tool. One server, one place your data lives, one bill for the infrastructure.

The pricing pattern is the part that changes the day-to-day:

• Flat server cost, not per seat. Adding a salesperson does not change the Projecto bill. Adding the whole company does not change it either.
• Unlimited users, contacts, and boards. The constraint is hardware capacity, not a license tier, so you size the server to the team rather than trimming users to fit a plan.
• Admin and roles built in. Multi-user with proper permissions and an admin who manages access, the same model you would expect from an enterprise tool, on a server you rent.

Projecto itself is a self-hosted project management and smart CRM with four views over the same cards: Kanban, Table, Gallery, and Calendar. Seven templates including a Sales Pipeline CRM, Project Management, Sprint Planner, and OKRs cover the common patterns. Eighteen card property types cover the rest, with rich-text descriptions and inline editing.

For Singapore companies, the PDPA story is the quieter half of the pitch. Customer records sit on a server you rent rather than a foreign cloud vendor’s database. There is no external processor on the contact list, which removes one whole category of cross-border data transfer concern. The audit trail is a server you control, not a contract with a vendor far outside the jurisdiction.

Underneath, Projecto is a TypeScript monorepo with React and Express on SQLite. JSON export and import handles backups and migration. The data format is open and inspectable, so the way you leave is as straightforward as the way you arrive.

What it looks like in practice

A Singapore SME with twelve people moves off three subscriptions: a per-seat CRM, a per-seat team chat with a paid workspace tier, and a per-seat project board. The combined cost was scaling with every new hire and would have crossed an awkward threshold by the next quarter.

They migrate the pipeline to Projecto on a rented server. The existing sales boards keep their structure on a Sales Pipeline CRM template. The eighteen card property types absorb the custom fields the previous CRM carried. JSON import brings the contact list across. Admin roles are configured so the sales team owns its boards and leadership has read access to the full pipeline.

The result is not dramatic, which is the point. The team uses a CRM that looks and works like a CRM. The cost stops scaling with headcount. The contact data sits inside Singapore on a server the company rents and controls, not on a database somewhere else.

A few months later they hire three more people. The Projecto bill does not change. The same hires would have added three additional seats on each of the previous three subscriptions, every month, indefinitely.

Where this approach has limits

A rented private server is not the right answer for every situation, and being clear about that matters.

If the team is two or three people running a light pipeline with a handful of contacts, the cheapest tier of a per-seat tool may still cost less than dedicated infrastructure. The bundle pays off when there is a team to consolidate, not when usage is occasional.

If your motion depends on a heavily customised enterprise CRM with deep integrations into industry-specific systems, the right move is often to keep that workload where the integrations live, and use Projecto for the parts of the business it already fits. We will tell you which side you sit on.

A private server adds the responsibility of being a tenant on your own infrastructure. We handle setup, hardening, and maintenance, but you should plan to have a sense of who owns admin access, who handles user changes, and who keeps an eye on backups. Most SMEs find this lighter than they expected, but it is not zero.

For how a Projecto setup would be sized to your team, drop us an email for more information rather than a generic figure.

MT Labs helps companies across Singapore deploy AI tools they actually own. Private infrastructure, no recurring cloud subscriptions, and a setup built around how your team already works. Whether you’re exploring your first AI use case or consolidating scattered tools into one system, we’ll walk you through it. Get in touch and let’s figure out what makes sense for your business.