The truth behind the $0 CRM
Can a business really use a CRM for free?
I’ve actually had a couple of clients where the business owner literally wanted to pay nothing for a CRM. Of course, this is next to impossible if you want someone other than yourself to use it. But in the spirit of fun and education, I created this calculator to let you give it a try.
Here’s a little bit more about this interactive tool that every CRM consultant should keep in their bookmarks.
Self-hosted assumes you own the infrastructure
This means you will pay for and manage the following:
- Hosting
- Security
- Backups
- Your domain
- Compliance
- Patching and upgrades
If you self-host, you need a professional—not a vibe coder
Vibe coding is cool for prototyping and turning out a lot of code. But should you choose to host your own CRM, you want a team or consultant familiar with provisioning applications from start to finish.
Things like AWS hosting, EC2 instances, database indexing and tuning, RBAC and others are important to a successful launch. And it’s something you can’t just prompt your way through. Of course, engineers like us cost money, so you’ll need to budget for it.
If you want to see how broad the work can become, read about my journey from CRM administrator to solution architect .
Free cloud tools are generally for solo founders or smaller businesses
If you are planning on expanding your team or client base, you’ll want the latest and greatest when it comes to automation. Free tools simply don’t have all the bells and whistles the core platforms have. I say this as a guy with a SaaS that offers a free tier.
We don’t dump all the features into the free version because no one would ever have a reason to upgrade. And I wouldn’t make any money, which would result in my kids not being able to purchase Robux.
And if you’re thinking about switching platforms just to save some money, take this quiz to help you decide if you should dump your CRM first.
Remember: your labor is only free if your time is worthless.
