Internal Project Management and CRM System – InityCore
A unified project management and CRM system built in 70 hours to replace Jira + HubSpot - purpose-built for an agency with a fluid team structure
Ongoing work
Inity (Internal)
SaaS
Project Deliverables
Location
Zagreb, CroatiaTools & Tech Stack
Project overview
Inity Agency runs on a core team of 11 with a rotating roster of specialist freelancers brought in per project. For two years, the team ran on Jira for project management and HubSpot for CRM – 2 industry-standard tools that individually did their jobs well, but together created more friction than they solved.
The combined cost of licenses, seat-based pricing for freelancers, and time lost to switching between two disconnected systems reached a point where building a replacement was the obvious decision. 70 hours. One system that replaced both.
The result: a unified PM + CRM tool in daily use by the entire team, a CRM that actually gets updated because it lives inside the delivery workflow, and a break-even point reached in under nine months on the conservative cost model.
Challenges
Seat-Based Pricing That Didn't Fit the Team Structure
Inity's model depends on bringing in the right specialist for each project – a researcher for discovery, an additional designer for a large sprint, a developer for a specific technical phase. In Jira, each of those people needed a seat. When their engagement ended, the seat remained active and the billing continued. There was no clean way to handle a fluctuating headcount without either overpaying for unused licenses or creating administrative overhead to constantly manage seat allocation.
No Unified View Across All Clients and Projects
As CEO, Iva needed a complete picture of all active work across all clients at any given moment — without navigating through multiple boards, applying filters, or mentally assembling a status view from fragments. Jira's board structure is designed around projects in isolation. Getting a cross-client overview required a level of configuration and navigation that simply didn't fit the pace of daily leadership.
A CRM That Nobody Actually Used
HubSpot is a strong CRM product. It was also being used by one person, inconsistently, because it existed in a completely separate context from where the actual client work happened. Opening HubSpot meant switching tabs, re-orienting to a different interface, and treating CRM updates as a separate administrative task rather than a natural part of the workflow. The result: a pipeline that was rarely current and a tool that wasn't earning its cost.
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Solution
One Interface for Everything
The core architectural decision was to make the PM and CRM a single system, not two tools connected by an integration, but one product where client records, project status, and sales pipeline live in the same database and surface through the same interface. This eliminated the context-switching that was driving adoption failure on the CRM side and removed the need to maintain consistency between two separate data sources.
Unified Task View as the Primary Screen
The most-used screen in the system is a single task view that shows all active work across all clients and all projects simultaneously, no filters required to assemble the picture. For a CEO managing 8–12 concurrent client engagements, this screen replaced a workflow that previously required navigating multiple Jira boards and cross-referencing manually. The information was always available before; now it's immediately visible.
RBAC Built In From the Start
Role-based access control was designed as a core feature rather than an add-on. Team members see the clients and projects relevant to their work. Freelancers get scoped access to the single project they're engaged on without requiring a full license or gaining visibility into unrelated client data. The access model scales with the team structure rather than against it, adding a collaborator takes minutes and costs nothing in additional licensing.
Sales Pipeline Embedded in Delivery
The CRM pipeline was built directly into the same interface as project delivery, not as a separate section, but as a connected view where leads, active clients, and past clients exist on a single relationship timeline. When a lead becomes a project, the record carries forward. When a project wraps up, the client record remains accessible for future pipeline work. The boundary between sales and delivery that made HubSpot adoption fail no longer exists.
Inity Agency built a custom PM + CRM system in 70 hours using Next.js, PostgreSQL, and Cloudflare; replacing Jira and HubSpot with a single unified interface that includes a cross-client task view, embedded sales pipeline, and role-based access control for freelancers without per-seat licensing costs.
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