Ten months.
That's the default in the "months left on your contract" slider on our migration calculator. Leave it there, keep the other defaults ($200,000 a year on CRM, $60,000 on marketing automation) and the calculator's first line is what you'd spend running both systems while the old contracts run out: $216,667. Money that buys nothing new. It's the price of starting the move too late.
The number isn't anyone's real bill. The arithmetic is. And it's why I think most companies make their biggest CRM decision of the year without noticing they made it.
The renewal usually lands on someone's desk as admin. Procurement wants a signature, the account executive wants a multi-year term, and the team that uses the system every day isn't in the room. Nobody decides to stay. The date arrives and the contract rolls over.
To be fair to the people signing: staying is often right. Salesforce is a serious product. If the number in your CRM matches the number finance reports without a spreadsheet in between, renew and spend the energy somewhere else. If you're halfway through an ERP rollout, this is the wrong quarter to move anything, whatever the licence maths says. We say both of those on our own site, and we mean them.
But if your reps already work around the system, the renewal doesn't buy you another year of Salesforce. It buys another year of the workaround. That's the thing worth deciding on purpose.
When people price a move off Salesforce, they price the build. That's the right place to start, and it's the part we publish. A move to HubSpot starts at $40k for one hub, starting fresh. Leaving a legacy system adds a flat $25k however many systems you leave, so Salesforce and Marketo together cost the same as either one. The smallest migration is $65k, and each further hub is $25k.
The part that catches people is the overlap. If the new system goes live after the old contract has renewed, you pay for both until the next exit point. That cost has nothing to do with how good the migration is. It depends only on the calendar.
So timing is often worth more than any discount you'll negotiate on the renewal itself. A few percent off the licence is nice. Not paying for two CRMs for most of a year is better.
Start with the renewal clause, before any demo or partner call. Three things matter: the end date, whether the contract renews automatically, and how much notice cancelling needs. Everything else in the project can move. That date can't.
Then work backwards. For scale: a single-hub move is usually about three months. CyCognito's Marketo contract was expiring with no option to extend, and they moved 70,000 contacts and close to 50 live campaigns in twelve weeks, with zero issues at cutover. Rapyd moved four hubs and 40 teams off Salesforce in six months. Bigger stacks take longer, and the thing that sets the pace is usually how fast your side makes decisions, not how fast anyone builds.
If the date is too close for the scope, don't pretend otherwise. Move one hub now and the rest at the next exit point, or plan the whole move properly for the next renewal. Both beat promising a go-live you'll miss and paying for the overlap anyway.
The renewal is the one moment every year when leaving costs the least. Miss it and the cheapest exit is at least another term away.
We built a page for exactly this: what the renewal decides and how we plan a move around the contract date. If you'd rather see your own numbers first, the calculator shows the overlap cost without asking for an email.
When's your renewal, and has anyone actually decided what happens on the day?