Every thread in here about tracking quotes looks the same: a spreadsheet with client, amount, status. Nobody's got a reason column. So you lose 6 quotes in a row and you've got a list with no clue why any of them fell through.

We got annoyed enough by our own log to actually fix it. Built 3 free templates: a lost-bid log with reason + revisit date columns, 5 text scripts for reaching out to clients who went quiet a year ago, and a one-page client card - last contact, what you promised, what's next.

No email wall, no signup, nothing to fill in first. Link's in the first comment - grab whatever's useful and skip the rest.

What column would you add that we missed?

A few days ago I posted here about what we left out of a CRM built for one to ten person service businesses. One reply told me to put up a pricing table, because people are not going to put their data in without knowing what the price will be once the beta ends. I pushed back at the time. I said I would rather show nothing than a number I might have to change in a month.

That was the wrong call and it is obvious once you write it out. Asking somebody to import a client list is asking for the one asset in a small business that cannot be rebuilt if it goes wrong. In that situation "free for now" is not a discount, it is an open liability, and the person carrying it is the one doing the import, not me.

So the price is public now, and it applies from day one rather than from whenever we decide the beta is over.

$39 a month for one person. Teams start at $89 a month. Every person after that is a flat add on rather than a new tier.

No feature tiers, no contact sales, no plan where a field you were using disappears if you downgrade. The reasoning is that everything we cut out of the product for the sake of simplicity comes straight back in through the pricing page if the pricing page has nine boxes on it. If the bill does not fit in one sentence, the product is not simple, it just looks simple until the invoice shows up.

The part I genuinely do not know is the team side, so one question for anyone running a service business with two to ten people: at that size do you actually need roles and permissions, meaning who can see which clients and who is allowed to delete something, or is one shared client list where everyone sees everything the correct answer and the permissions are just a habit we picked up from bigger companies?

Most CRM advice here is about which tool has the feature you need. We came at it from the other end. We run a two-person studio, we tried the usual tools, and every one of them died the same way - not for lack of a feature, but because keeping them current became a second job.

So when we built our own, the question each time was what to remove.

Kept out, or kept optional:

Pipeline stages. A two-person business doesn't have a pipeline, it has a list of people it owes an answer to. Stages are there but they are optional.

Reporting. Nobody with eight active clients needs a chart to know how it's going.

Team permissions and assignment. There is no team (yet - may change if users want it).

Automation sequences. If you send enough email to need sequences, you're a different business than this.

Mattered more than expected:

More than one date on the same record. Quote sent, follow-up, work starts, invoice due. Almost every tool gives you one date field, which is exactly why people go back to a spreadsheet.

Being able to write a plain sentence about a person that isn't a structured field.

Opening it on a phone in a van and it not being a worse version of the desktop (it's a PWA).

The honest downside: it's not ideal if you hire a fifth person or your sales cycle passes a few months. That isn't a roadmap item, it's the point.

I built it, so read accordingly.