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?