Recently I went to an AI conference and got quite a handful of leads ~300. Felt like the right point where I should switch from my excel sheets to actually start considering a CRM now since I will be needing things like email open rates, follow ups, tracking lead with a person in team etc.

Sadly, all the popular CRMs I checked out, had some small but critical feature behind a paywall. I tried hubspot, leadsquared, zoho crm, asana(as a hack) before I gave up. Like even using basic filters and sort feature is paywalled!

Knowing that selecting a CRM is going to be a one time activity, I really don't want to pick a CRM and later realise that some stupid feature requires $10 to unlock.

At this point I’m seriously considering building a simple CRM for myself that just includes all of this without locking random useful features behind higher plans. I strongly believe for small business a proper functional CRM should be free of such bs. If you have less than 1000 leads to manage, happy to onboard you if interested (free of cost ofc).