I’ve been researching field service software for a while now and Housecall Pro kept coming up over and over again in pretty much every comparison or discussion I found, so I decided to finally give it a try.

I signed up for the free trial and did a demo and honestly I thought I had finally found the software I was going to go with. It seemed like it checked a lot of the boxes I was looking for.

But the more I’ve used it and the more I’ve looked into it, I’m starting to have second thoughts. The platform feels a little more complicated than I was expecting and the price is also a bit higher than I really want to spend. We're a team of 6 so we'd be looking at around $650 a month.

I’ve also been going through a lot of the reviews and experiences people have posted about Housecall Pro and some of them honestly have me a little nervous about committing to it.

The follow up calls after the demo have also been a little excessive too, I get calls every day.

Now I’m basically back to looking at alternatives. I’ve been doing more research and I keep coming back to Jobber and Clientility, I hear good things about them on reddit.

I’m mainly looking for something pretty straightforward with scheduling, estimates, invoicing, customer management, team assigning, payroll, etc.

I’d really like to see alternatives so I can make another decision because I thought I was done researching after finding Housecall Pro.

Hey,
I am looking for a CRM for personal networking. My requirements are:

• Completely free, not just a free trial or limited-time offer
• Basic CRM functionality: contact management, custom properties/tags, segments, etc.
• Automated follow-ups when someone hasn't responded after X days
• Some basic email integration/tracking
• Quick and easy to set up. I don't need a full-featured sales CRM with a steep learning curve

I have looked into some options but none really check all the boxes. However, I am completely new to CRM so I might not have th best judgment here. Any and all recommendations are highly appreciated, thanks in advance.

Don't do it if any of these are not in place:

- Customers who are really ready to give you the money and have signed a contract;

- Have less than 5 years of experience working with different CRMs

- If you wanna create a domain-specific CRM, talk to that business, because you can 'solve' the problem that doesn't exist

- You have no idea about SDLC and security

- You don't have an enormous marketing budget.

Just don't. You will not make money from Reddit posts about your CRM.

The time of 'Build and users will follow' is past. You can't compete with HS, SF, PD, Zoho, Monday, and other big players. Most of them have literally free or 9$ seats.

A serious company will not consider giving data to a no-name CRM, so you will have to target SMB, which is expensive and hard. Your customers DON'T sit here in this subreddit

To make an MVP you will need at least 160h to make it run. And hundreds of hours of bug fixing and polishing. And you didn't even touch marketing. SEO?- impossible in this niche. Paid ads? - one of the most expensive. GEO? - same as SEO.

In a delusional fever, I made mine, learned my lessons, and made it free for everybody. Even with the rich free package, only 50 people registered, and like 20 are using it regularly.

All the AI, security standards matching ISO2700, UI copied from Pipedrive, customization possibilities. Still, every CRM is a glorified Excel sheet under the hood.

You can check out mine w/o registration just to touch it. There is a demo page.

https://ln2crm.com/crm.html

We have consultants in our industry that service multiple Accounts. I have been adding essentially duplicate contacts to each account, only a few so far but…

Wondering the best way to handle this.

Would we be better off creating these consultants as accounts and creating a field in accounts to select that Account as the Accounts consultant (or Accounts contact), or just stick to using duplicate contact entries?

I manage a software service with my team, handling both development and sales to client companies. I’d like to share an experience I had last year.

I successfully closed a deal with a new client. They were very positive about our service, and the contract had already been signed. However, I lost the client due to an absurd mistake, resulting in financial loss.

Once the contract was signed, I mentally filed the matter away as "done." I was busy developing new features at the time and focused more on coding than sales; since the client didn't reach out, I assumed everything was going smoothly.

The problem lay in the ambiguous position of the client's point of contact. API integration required approval from their IT team; a request had been submitted, but the IT team was slow to act. From the contact person's perspective, this was an internal company matter—not something to discuss with a vendor. Yet, had I known the situation, I could have resolved it by sending security documentation or contacting their IT team directly.

Consequently, the implementation was delayed, and the contract faded from both my memory and theirs. I only realized what had happened when I noticed the contract was missing while reconciling quarterly sales figures. Had I simply sent a quick email to the contact person, the contract might still be active today.

After that, I decided I needed a way to handle follow-ups after closing a deal, so I looked for such a feature in HubSpot, the CRM we were using. While the feature existed, it was only available in the Professional plan. We were on the Starter plan, and we couldn't justify paying an extra $80 per user just for that "cadence" feature.

So, I built a custom cadence tool myself. It connects our existing CRM with our email system; once a deal is marked as "won," it automatically generates CRM tasks and sends emails on scheduled dates—both after the deal closes and before the contract expires. Curious if it would be useful to others, I asked five acquaintances who work in sales to give it a try.

For some, it wasn't necessary because the CRM they were already using offered "cadence" features even in their low-cost plans. However, those in a similar situation to mine found it quite useful.

If you’re in a similar position and would like to try it out, please leave a comment.

I’ll send you the link if you do. It hasn't officially launched yet, so I'm currently collecting names for the waitlist.

has anyone completed 3rd round of recruit crm?

When a prospect says, "We're interested, but reach out next quarter,” where do you put them?

Keeping the deal open could make the active pipeline look bigger than it really is. Closing it as lost feels inaccurate when timing is the only issue.

Do you use a separate nurture stage, close the deal and set a task, or something else?

Also curious about what happens when that reminder comes due. Does the original rep still own the follow-up?

I require a 50% proficiency in this tool within three days. I would greatly appreciate the assistance of a one-on-one meeting with an individual possessing in-depth knowledge of its functionalities.

I welcome any relevant responses below.

I’m building a Business Management OS that helps businesses manage CRM, leads, quotations, invoices, payments, bookings, operations, finance, marketing, analytics and more — all in one place.

I’m now looking for salespeople, marketers, agencies, or growth partners interested in a collaboration / commission / revenue-share model.

Currently exploring niches like wedding planners, event businesses, agencies and service businesses.

Looking for people who can help with lead generation, sales and customer acquisition.
If interested,

DM me with your experience and how you’d like to collaborate.

Went through all 3 - what a mess - even after all these years in biz. Onboarding wizzard with no skip option, internal search from 10 years ago and instead of fixing the ui and letting users do the work via api with agents who will read the docs they still force all that reading onto the human users.

Is there an api-first crm besides these dinosaurs?

Currently in beta. Would anyone care to test? Dm me

I ran a dedupe check on my own contacts (about 2,400 numbers, mostly US and Italy) and hit something I can't fix cleanly.

566 of them have no country code, so whatever normalizes them has to guess one. For 46 of those, both guesses give a valid number. A ten digit number starting with 347 is a New York number and also an Italian Vodafone mobile. 339, 330 and 320 do the same thing. libphonenumber calls it valid either way, so validation never catches the wrong pick, and 41 of those cards had no other number on them to go by.

I build a contacts export app (Contact Exporter) and ran into this while testing its cleanup step.

Where does yours take the default country from? The user's locale, the account's country, the contact's address? And does anything flag a number that's valid in two places?

Looking for some honest feedback from other Applied Epic agencies.

We're currently using InsuredMine (and have been for a year), but adoption has been tougher than expected. Our producers want to work in Outlook, not log into another system, and right now it feels like they're being asked to spend more time documenting activities than they would by just working in Epic.

Part of the challenge is that we've tried CRMs in the past that never really stuck, so there's already a lot of skepticism. Nobody wants double work, duplicate data entry, or another system to maintain.

We're a team of about 15 producers, and our goal was to have a CRM that could become the primary workspace while syncing activity back to Epic. InsuredMine does some of that, but not as seamlessly as we hoped.

For those using Applied Epic:

• What CRM are you using?
• Do your producers actually use it?
• Can they work mostly from Outlook?
• Does it reduce work or create more of it?

I'm also starting to look at Salesforce because of its relationship with Applied, but I'd appreciate hearing what's working (or not working) in the real world.

Hey guys, what sales stack or CRM do you use? I am single founder (CTO is just building), tried bunch of free subscriptions, always ended up going back to my excel. Record and analyze my calls, and do summaries. Is that good enough? Also havent yet sold anything.. But did lots of discovery but cannot convert

Every email workflow comprises a trigger and a sequence mapped out in detail. But so few of them have a real answer for when the sequence should stop.

It’s a pattern that pops up across many different setups. A nurture sequence is built for new leads, or a re-engagement flow for dormant contacts, and it works well for the first few weeks. Then a lead converts, or a dormant contact responds through a different channel entirely, but the automation keeps going.

What you’re left with is a contact who signed a contract last month, who is still receiving your "Here's why you should switch" emails. And the person who already responded to your emails is still receiving your re-engagement drip because there’s nothing telling the sequence to check.

What tends to happen is that teams create the trigger and the content first, because the outreach is what they’re focused on. The exit condition often becomes an afterthought. But it's arguably the part that determines how helpful the automation actually is.

A sequence without any exit logic isn’t primed to scale well. It just quietly multiplies the number of people receiving the wrong message at the wrong time. And most teams don't find out until someone complains or unsubscribes.

The fix is to tie the sequence to a status change or a completed goal and let that pull the contact out automatically. But it requires thinking about how the workflow will end with the same care as you do when planning how it begins.

How do you handle this in practice? Do you build exit conditions into every sequence by default, or only add them after something's already gone wrong?

Hey everyone!

We’ve been building PipelineIQ.EU, a lightweight CRM and revenue intelligence platform for small B2B teams, startups, agencies, consultants, SaaS companies, and growing sales teams that want a proper sales system without the complexity that often comes with larger CRM platforms.

We’re now opening PipelineIQ.EU up to a small group of early users.

The main idea is simple: help teams spend less time digging through spreadsheets, tabs, and disconnected tools, and more time actually knowing where deals stand, what needs attention, and what should happen next.

Right now, PipelineIQ.EU includes things like company and contact management, deal tracking, customizable pipeline stages, multiple contacts per company, activity timelines, notes, calls, follow-ups, tasks and reminders, forecasting, pipeline dashboards, revenue reporting, deal history, company intelligence, CSV imports, duplicate detection, record merging, import cleanup, multiple currencies, team accounts, invitations, and user roles.

We’ve also built tools around data quality and pipeline visibility, so teams can get a clearer picture of what is happening across their sales process instead of relying on manually updated spreadsheets or scattered notes.

On the automation side, we’re working on more AI-assisted data cleaning, pipeline analysis, prioritization, and identifying which opportunities need attention, while keeping the underlying data and logic visible rather than turning the CRM into a black box.

PipelineIQ is designed to sit in that space between “we’ve outgrown spreadsheets” and “we don’t need the weight of a huge enterprise CRM.”

The goal is to keep it straightforward enough that people actually use it, while still giving founders, salespeople, and managers the information they need to understand their pipeline.

If you run or work in a small B2B company, agency, consultancy, SaaS business, startup, or sales team and you’re looking for a simpler CRM, we’d love to have you as one of our early users.

You can check it out and let us know what you think.

We’re based in Denmark, but early access is open internationally.

I work for a law firm, and I originally became a notary simply to provide notary services for the firm. At some point, I had the idea of allowing walk-ins to come in for notary services. My thinking was simple: people would come into the office, see the firm, meet the staff, and become familiar with who we are. Essentially, the notary service became a form of free marketing.

I created a Google Maps listing for the notary service, and, lo and behold, people started showing up. A lot of people.

As the volume increased, keeping up with the required notary logbook and recordkeeping became difficult. Since I have a hard time doing anything halfway, and I also happen to be a software engineer, I decided to build my own solution.

The first version was very simple. I created an electronic sign-in system and placed a QR code in the office. Walk-in clients could scan the code, enter their information, and the data would automatically be uploaded and stored in Dropbox. That became my first digital notary logbook.

Then another idea hit me: why stop at a digital logbook? Why not build an entire CRM around it and use the information to improve client communication and marketing?

I personally hate spam, so I did not want to bombard people with constant promotional emails. Instead, I created a Birthday and Holiday Registry. Clients could receive a simple birthday greeting and occasional holiday message. The purpose was not aggressive advertising. It was simply a friendly reminder that we exist and that they had used our services before. I also added an OpenAI layer that sent each holiday and birthday email custom made. Based on their name and date. Example... The email would say something relating to history or notary on that day.

That worked surprisingly well.

As the business continued to grow, I started receiving more and more walk-ins. Other notaries also became interested in joining the platform and operating under my business name in something similar to a franchise or affiliated network.

That pushed me to expand the software even further.

I began adding more advanced functionality, including additional security layers, enhanced electronic recordkeeping, multilingual support, notary training and quizzes for multiple states, administrative tools, client management features, and more sophisticated compliance functions.

I also developed an advanced remote notary session tracking and request submission system, allowing remote notarization requests to be submitted, assigned, tracked, and managed through the same platform.

What originally started as a simple QR-code sign-in sheet for walk-in notary clients gradually evolved into a complete notary CRM's, recordkeeping, marketing, training, and remote session management platform.

I also built an iOS app that's linked to the CRM (was a nightmare to do). Had to figure out how PHP / Firebase bridge works. So now my iOS app is directly linked to the CRM.

I'm the founder of PitchWhip, so I have a commercial interest in this workflow. I'm trying to understand how teams handle agreed B2B follow-ups across these channels today.

Say a prospect agrees on a call that you'll send some information by WhatsApp or SMS, then replies there and changes the next step. The email sequence is still running and another rep opens the CRM later.

When that happens, how does your team pause any now-irrelevant email follow-up and record the next action and owner?

Do you handle that through a shared inbox, native CRM logging or manual notes? I'd be interested in a real example of whether connecting these channels has helped your team follow through on a deal, or whether a note and a reminder do the job just as well.

Not a marketing - only idea
TL;DR: A concept for a reporting tool that connects business data and delivers recurring, decision-ready briefs. Instead of showing only charts, it explains what changed, why it may have changed, what evidence supports the conclusion, and what action to take next. Users can ask follow-up questions, while uncertainty and alternative explanations remain visible. The idea still needs validation with SaaS teams, agencies, and e-commerce operators.

Businesses rarely lack data. A founder can open analytics, payments, advertising, and support tools and still not know what deserves attention first.

I have been thinking about a reporting tool built around that gap. It would connect to a company's existing sources and produce a report every day, week, or month. Instead of stopping at charts, it would explain what changed, suggest why, recommend concrete actions, and accept follow-up questions.

Every important conclusion would show its source, metric, comparison period, and confidence. The report would separate measured facts from interpretations, missing information, and alternative explanations. Recommendations would include their expected effect, cost, downside, and a safe way to test them.

The same engine could support different report structures for SaaS teams, agencies, and e-commerce operators. I would still begin with one group, probably small SaaS teams, rather than build a shallow tool for everyone.

For SaaS, that could mean connecting revenue, activation, product usage, and support. Agency reports might explain campaign performance and delivery risks. E-commerce reports could relate advertising, orders, inventory, fulfilment, returns, and repeat purchases.

AI could help connect patterns and answer questions, but it would remain an implementation detail. The promise is better decisions, not an “AI analyst.”

The system should recommend actions without executing consequential ones automatically. Its value would depend on whether people repeatedly discover something useful and make better decisions. Otherwise, it is only a prettier dashboard.

If you are a BI practitioner or run a SaaS company, agency, or e-commerce business, I would like to know: what decision did your dashboards fail to help you make recently?

I build PitchWhip and I’m trying to understand how sales teams handle this before calling someone at their new company.

Say you spoke to a buyer at Company A about a project and agreed to follow up. They then move to Company B. You want to keep the relationship history, but the old project, pricing discussion and callback might have nothing to do with their new job.

Updating the existing contact keeps everything together, but risks making the old company’s context look current. Creating another contact separates the jobs but splits the history.

What do you actually do in your CRM? And when you open the record before that first call at Company B, what should carry over and what should stay attached to Company A?