How to Evaluate Lead Routing Tools (When Most of Them Won't Survive)

You’ve finally found a lead routing tool that handles your edge cases. Your team members know exactly which leads are theirs. Every new lead gets to the right person in real time. Response times have dropped. Then one morning, the tool just… stops working. No warning. No migration path. Your carefully configured rules, gone. New leads and deals pile up unassigned while your team scrambles.

This isn’t hypothetical. Since 2022, two Pipedrive CRM lead routing tools have launched and died. That’s a 100% failure rate for new entrants. Their customers lived this scenario.

Before you compare features, you need to evaluate something most buyers skip entirely: will this tool still exist in two years?

The Graveyard Nobody Talks About

Lead routing looks like a simple problem from the outside. Assign incoming leads to sales reps in some kind of rotation. How hard could it be?

Hard enough that every new tool in this space has failed.

RepRouter launched around 2022 with a clever angle: it let you add sales reps outside of your Pipedrive account, so you wouldn’t have to pay Pipedrive’s per-seat cost for every agent receiving leads. Smart idea in theory. In practice, it created more problems than it solved. Your sales reps almost certainly need access to Pipedrive anyway, and the workflow friction of managing agents in two places wasn’t worth saving $24/month per rep. RepRouter shut down in 2024.

Another competitor launched in 2022 after its founder spent months as a customer of an existing routing tool, then built a near-identical copy. Feature for feature, even down to the wording, including grammatical errors. (How do I know? They were my grammatical errors.) It lasted about 18 months before going dark.

The 92% failure rate for micro-SaaS startups within three years sounds abstract until you watch it happen in your specific niche. In Pipedrive lead routing, it’s 100%. When your project management app shuts down, you’re annoyed. When your lead routing tool shuts down, leads pile up unassigned. Your team’s response time, the metric you’ve worked so hard to improve, craters.

Why This Matters More Than Features

When a routing tool dies, you won’t get a graceful sunset with months of warning. You’ll get silence.

One day the tool works. The next day it doesn’t. Your routing rules, the ones you spent hours configuring, vanish. Any historical assignment data disappears. You’re scrambling to rebuild workflow automation in Pipedrive’s native feature or find an alternative, all while new leads sit unassigned and go cold.

Rebuilding a sophisticated routing setup from scratch takes 4-8 hours minimum, assuming you documented your edge cases. (You probably didn’t. Most people discover gaps weeks later when a lead falls through the cracks.) For small businesses without dedicated operations staff, this disruption to the sales process can mean lost revenue for days.

This isn’t a worst-case hypothetical. In December 2024, Bench, an accounting platform that had raised over $100 million, shut down abruptly, leaving thousands of businesses without access to their financial records. Two months later, Skybox Security closed after raising more than $330 million. If well-funded companies can disappear overnight, a bootstrapped Pipedrive integration built by a solo developer is even more vulnerable.

The smaller the tool, the less warning you’ll get. There’s no PR team managing the narrative, no acquisition to soften the landing. The founder just stops responding to support tickets, and eventually the servers go offline.

Why Lead Routing Tools Fail

The complexity that will eventually bite you

From the outside, lead routing looks straightforward: a lead comes in, you assign it to the next rep in line. But the edge cases multiply fast.

What happens when 50 new leads or deals come in within the same second during a webinar signup surge? What do you do when Pipedrive sends you the same webhook three times in a row (which it does)? How do you handle timezone boundaries when a rep’s shift ends at midnight in Sydney but it’s still Tuesday in London? What if two reps try to claim the same lead at the exact same moment?

These aren’t theoretical problems. They’re the daily reality of running a routing tool at scale. Most founders discover them only after launching, when real customer data starts exposing the gaps.

Side project economics

Many Pipedrive CRM integrations start as side projects. A developer has a sales team, needs better routing, builds something for themselves, figures they might as well sell it. That’s a reasonable origin story. It’s how RouterJet started, and it’s how a lot of good software gets built.

The problem comes later. Side projects compete with job offers, family obligations, new interests, and the simple reality that maintaining software is less fun than building it. When the founder’s circumstances change, the tool gets neglected, then abandoned.

There’s no succession plan because there’s no team. No runway because there’s no funding. Just a founder who stops answering emails and a server that eventually goes offline.

What to Look For When Evaluating Tools

How long have they actually been doing this?

Two years is the minimum for taking any tool seriously. Three years means they’ve survived the initial scaling problems and, just as important, the founder hasn’t gotten bored and moved on.

Here’s a useful litmus test: were they around before April 2023? That’s when Pipedrive launched native automatic assignment rules, directly competing with every third-party routing tool. Tools that existed before that date and are still here today have proven staying power. Tools that launched after haven’t faced that kind of competitive pressure yet.

Who’s behind it? Research suggests technical founders have significantly higher survival rates than non-technical ones because they can fix problems themselves rather than depending on contractors or burning cash on developers. A solo technical founder running a profitable tool is often more stable than a funded startup with a large team and high burn rate.

Does the math actually work?

Is the pricing sustainable? Tools that seem too cheap to be true often are. If you’re paying $5/month for something that requires ongoing development, API costs, and customer support, something doesn’t add up. Either the founder is subsidizing it as a hobby, or they’ll eventually raise prices dramatically or shut down. (For a realistic look at what lead routing actually costs, see our pricing comparison.)

Is this someone’s core business or a side project? Neither is automatically better, but side projects are more vulnerable to abandonment. Look for signals: Is there a company behind it or just an individual? Are there other products sharing the founder’s attention?

Are they profitable, or burning through funding? Venture-backed tools can disappear fast when funding runs out. Bootstrapped profitable tools can run indefinitely, even if growth is slow.

Signs of active development

When was the last update or new feature? A tool that hasn’t shipped anything in a year might be in maintenance mode, or might be slowly dying.

How responsive is support? Slow or absent support responses are often the first sign of a tool winding down.

Exit path

What happens to your routing rules if you need to leave? Can you export your configuration, or would you have to rebuild everything from scratch?

How dependent would your workflows become on this specific tool? The more sophisticated your routing setup, the more painful a forced migration would be.

What This Means If You’re Evaluating RouterJet

Everything above applies to us too. Here’s how we’d answer our own questions:

How long? Since early 2019. Seven years of continuous operation. Built by technical founders, acquired in 2021, actively developed since.

Did you survive April 2023? Yes. When Pipedrive launched native assignment, we lost about 20% of revenue. Customers with simple routing needs left for Pipedrive’s free option, and they should have. If the native feature solves your problem, use it.

Why did anyone stay? Pipedrive’s native feature doesn’t handle shift-aware routing across time zones, escalation workflows, or notifications through Slack, SMS, and WhatsApp. Customers who needed those stayed. (See our feature comparison for the full breakdown.)

Are you profitable? Yes, without outside funding. No investor is going to pull the plug because we missed growth targets.

Who’s behind it? Technical founders. When something breaks at 2am, we fix it ourselves rather than waiting for a contractor.

We’ve now been doing lead routing for Pipedrive longer than Pipedrive has been doing it themselves. That’s context for evaluating whether we’ll still be here when you need support.

Before You Decide

Features matter. Pricing matters. But longevity might matter most.

A tool with fewer features that will definitely exist in three years beats a feature-rich tool that might disappear in six months. The time you’d spend rebuilding your routing workflows after a sudden shutdown (not to mention the leads you’d lose in the chaos) far exceeds any feature gap.

Once you’ve narrowed your options to tools with staying power, then compare features and pricing.

Before you commit, ask the questions most buyers skip:

• How long has this been running?
• Were they around before April 2023?
• Who’s behind it, and will they still be here when something breaks?

The answers might change your evaluation entirely.