We had a working inventory management setup at my last company, built on Airtable. Did the job for about a year and a half. Our ops lead decided we needed "full control" because it was getting expensive, so we spent three months having a contractor build a custom version. Within six weeks of launch, the warehouse guys were back to texting stock counts to the ops lead because the tool double-counted returns and nobody trusted it. We quietly went back to a paid setup.
Then this year, different job, same conversation. We're about 40 people, paying for inventory management, a CRM and support tools, and the idea was to replace the whole lot with one app. Inventory first, then sales and support, all working with the same data instead of moving things between systems.
This time the argument was "we can build it with Codex." Which, honestly, sounded reasonable to me too. Fewer subscriptions, no upgrading Airtable plans because we'd hit a record limit, and we could change things ourselves instead of waiting on a vendor. I just didn't want to repeat the warehouse situation.
Then we started listing what this thing actually needed. Warehouse staff should be able to update stock without seeing everything sales can see. Support needs customer history, but probably shouldn't be able to change every field in it. Someone needs to know who changed a number when it looks wrong. Then there's SSO, removing access when people leave, and checking that the permissions actually hold up outside whatever buttons we've hidden in the UI.
Suddenly we're discussing how to build and test our own permissions system before we've even replaced the inventory tool. Codex might help us write it, but somebody still has to check it, maintain it and deal with the consequences when it's wrong. None of that was in the original "look how much we'll save on subscriptions" conversation.
So I started looking at databases and app builders that already had those pieces together. We wanted one place to build our own workflows, with permissions, audit logs and login handled, rather than another project just to make the first project safe to use.
We ended up deciding to try Jet Admin because it connects to Airtable and has permissions, audit logs and SSO built in. We can start with the data we already have, test the inventory workflow, and work out the database move separately. Obviously, keeping Airtable underneath doesn't make its bill disappear. But it lets us try the app before moving everything and committing sales and support to it too.
Now we're back to considering a paid platform after starting this whole thing to get rid of paid platforms. I'm fine with that if it saves us months of rebuilding the boring stuff. I just wish we'd included that work in the comparison from the beginning.
Has anyone actually managed to replace inventory, CRM and support with one in-house app? Where did you draw the line between building it yourselves and paying for the parts you didn't want to maintain?