I want to tell you about a tool that will make you angry.
Not because it’s bad. Because it’s good and you’ve probably never heard of it, whilst spending money every month on something you hate.
The tool is Simple CRM. It runs entirely in your browser. It has no server. It costs nothing. And it does exactly what a CRM is supposed to do — help you remember who you need to talk to and where things stand with them — without making you feel like you need a certification to use it.
Before I explain why it’s worth your attention, let me explain the problem it solves.
The CRM Trap Most Developers Fall Into
At some point you get clients. Or leads. Or users you’re having sales conversations with. And someone — maybe you, maybe a co-founder — says “we should put this in a CRM.”
So you sign up for Hubspot or Pipedrive or Salesforce depending on how ambitious you’re feeling, and you spend a weekend setting up pipelines and custom fields and automations. It feels productive. It feels like progress.
Then six weeks later nobody is using it. The contacts are stale. The pipeline stages don’t match how you actually work. And you’re back to a spreadsheet or, if you’re really honest with yourself, a notes app.
This is not a discipline problem. This is a complexity problem. Most CRMs are built for enterprise sales teams with dedicated operations staff. You are not that. You are a developer, or a small team founder, or a freelancer trying to keep track of eight clients without losing your mind.
Simple CRM is built for you.
What It Actually Does
Go to simple-crm.org and click Launch CRM. No email. No account. No credit card. No loading screen.
You get:
Contacts — name, company, email, phone. That’s the whole form. You are not asked for their LinkedIn URL, their industry vertical, their lead source, their annual revenue, or their preferred communication channel. You are asked who they are.
Notes — free-text interaction history. You write what happened and when. That’s it.
Opportunities — attach a deal to a contact, give it a value, give it a pipeline stage. Move it along as things progress.
Pipeline views — your deals recorded by stages.
That is the entire product. There is nothing else. And if your first instinct is “but what about—” then I want you to pause and ask yourself whether you actually use that feature in your current CRM, or whether you just like knowing it’s there.
The Privacy Angle Is Not a Gimmick
Simple CRM stores your data in IndexedDB — the browser’s built-in local database. Nothing goes to a server. There is no server. The people who built this literally cannot see your data even if they wanted to.
For developers this matters more than we usually admit. If you’re building in a sensitive space — fintech, health, legal, anything where your prospects have privacy expectations — you may be inadvertently piping their contact details into a third-party CRM’s database and hoping their data handling matches your promises to your users. With Simple CRM, that risk doesn’t exist.
There is an option to sync between devices using your own encryption key. You export, you transfer the file, you import. It is not automatic. For a solo developer or a small team doing a weekly pipeline check-in, this is perfectly adequate. If you need real-time multi-user sync with conflict resolution, you are probably building something at a scale where Simple CRM is not the right fit — and that’s fine.
The Mental Model That Makes This Work
The Simple CRM site describes a ‘weekly conversations’ model. The idea is that your CRM is not a database you query. It is prep material for a human conversation.
Once a week, you open it. You look at what’s in your pipeline. You ask: what moved last week, what’s stuck, what needs a nudge? You talk through it — with your co-founder, with your sales person, with yourself if you’re working solo. Then you close it.
That’s it. That’s the whole process.
This works because a simple tool actually gets updated. A complex tool gets avoided. The perfect CRM that nobody uses is worth less than the basic CRM that everybody opens.
Who This Is Actually For
Freelancers and consultants tracking multiple client relationships simultaneously. You’ve got retainers, proposals out, conversations in progress, and a vague memory that you were supposed to follow up with someone last Tuesday. Simple CRM handles all of that without becoming a second job.
Indie hackers and solo founders doing early customer development. You’re talking to potential users, running demos, collecting feedback. You need to remember who said what and where each conversation is headed. This is exactly what Simple CRM is built for.
Small startup teams who need their whole team to actually use the tool. Adoption is the hardest problem in sales tooling. Simple CRM’s learning curve is approximately zero. If someone can use a notes app, they can use this.
Developers who hate SaaS fees on principle. There is something philosophically satisfying about a tool that is free forever, stores your data locally, and does not have a pricing page.
The Honest Limitations
It is a fair critique that Simple CRM does not do email integration. It does not automatically log calls. It does not have workflow automation, lead scoring, reporting dashboards, or API access.
If you need those things, you need a different tool.
But here is the question worth sitting with: do you need those things right now, today, at your current scale? Or do you need a place to put contacts and notes so you don’t forget who you talked to last week?
Most developers in the early stages of a product or consultancy need the second thing. They sign up for the first thing. Then they pay for it, resent it, and eventually abandon it.
How to Start
- Go to simple-crm.org
- Click Launch CRM
- Add three contacts you’re currently in conversation with
- Add the relevant notes from memory
- Set a pipeline stage for each one
That is fifteen minutes of work. You will have a functioning CRM with real data in it by the time you finish your coffee.
Next week, open it again. Update what changed. Add any new contacts. That’s the whole system.
The Bigger Point
There is a class of tool that never gets written about because it doesn’t have a marketing budget, a growth team, or a referral programme. It just exists, it works, and the people who find it quietly use it and don’t think to tell anyone.
Simple CRM is that kind of tool.
The web is better when we talk about tools like this. Not everything worth using costs $99 a month and has a fifteen-step onboarding flow.
Sometimes it’s just a page that opens, does what you need, and gets out of your way.
Built by someone who apparently decided that privacy, simplicity, and zero cost were enough of a value proposition. They were right.
Top comments (0)