Four weeks ago, Texas Flange was running a 40-year-old industrial business out of Airtable. Today, they're running it on software they own outright — built from scratch, hosted on their own hardware, and live before the month was out.

The Problem With Outgrowing Your Tools

Texas Flange has been selling industrial flanges since 1986. For the last five years, the entire operation lived inside Airtable — quotes, jobs, shipments, customers, suppliers, all of it. For a long time, that worked.

Then the database hit 125,000 records. Then it kept growing.

By the time we started the migration, they were already 861 records over Airtable's limit. Staying on the platform meant paying significantly more for a plan that still had a ceiling — and once they factored in the AI features they needed to add, the projected annual cost climbed toward $50,000–$100,000 a year. For a tool they didn't own and couldn't fully control.

The math stopped making sense.

Three Weeks to Build It

Rather than keep patching a system that was fighting them, we built a new one.

The ERP was developed in three weeks. It went live in the fourth.

The cutover happened on a Sunday in May 2026. We migrated:

16,213 companies
37,669 quotes
1,516 jobs
6,389 supplier bills
867 freight bills

Eleven users were onboarded that same evening via passwordless login links. By Monday morning, the sales team was creating quotes in the new system like they'd been using it for years.

What Actually Changed

Before, a customer RFQ with multiple line items meant creating multiple records in Airtable and manually stitching them together before anything could go out the door. Now, a rep builds one quote, with all the line items, and the system generates a single quote number and a single PDF. That's it.

When entering a part spec, reps now see previous quotes for similar items right in the interface. Pricing stays consistent across customers and across the team without anyone having to remember or go looking.

Won quotes convert directly into jobs. Invoices and credit memos sync automatically into Xero. A category of work that used to mean manual re-entry just disappeared.

The system also handles accounts receivable tracking, supplier pricing lookups, freight calculations, customer compliance checks, and audit logging. There's an AI assistant built in — trained on internal documentation — so new employees can ask workflow questions directly inside the app instead of pulling someone away from what they're doing.

Is Your Stack Starting to Work Against You?

If you're at the point where your tools have record limits, your costs scale faster than your headcount, or you're stitching together four systems to do what one should — Texas Flange is a good example of what the alternative looks like.

Custom doesn't have to mean slow or expensive. It means built around your business, not the other way around.

We're SelfHosted ERP. This was our first case study. If it sounds like something worth talking about, we'd like to hear from you.