Who keeps this ledger

Firstclient covers one decision and nothing else: the CRM a small business opens first. Not the enterprise rollout, not the sales-operations rebuild — the moment a business with a handful of people decides that a phone's contact list and a folder of quotes is no longer where the customer relationship should live.

Why this desk exists

The category is badly served at the small end. Search for a CRM and you meet feature matrices written for buying committees, scores with no method behind them, and prices that turn out to belong to a billing term nobody mentioned. The number a three-person business needs is simple — what will this cost in a year, and what will end the free plan — and it is almost never the number on the page.

So this site does the boring half of the job. Every price is read on the vendor's own pricing page, written down with the day it was read, and printed with the billing term it belongs to. Every free tier is described by its cap rather than its adjectives.

How Firstclient reads a pricing page

Four rules, all of them dull and all of them load-bearing.

1. Read it at source. A price from a comparison blog is a rumour. If a vendor's page will not show us a figure, this site writes that it is not published rather than borrowing one.
2. Name the term. "Per seat per month" means nothing on its own. Zoho CRM's Standard edition is $14 per user per month on the annual term and $20 on the monthly one; both numbers are true and only one will be on your invoice.
3. Keep the one-time fees visible. HubSpot's Sales Hub Professional page states a required one-time onboarding fee of $1,500. No per-seat table will ever show you that, so we put it in the sentence.
4. Date everything. Software pricing moves without an announcement. Every figure on this site carries the day it was read, so you can tell at a glance whether to trust it or check it.

What this site will not publish

No invented measurements. Firstclient has not benchmarked CRM performance, timed anyone's onboarding or surveyed anyone's users, so it publishes no percentages, no adoption rates and no "we tested forty CRMs". Where a vendor makes a claim, the claim is attributed to the vendor and left as their claim.

No numbers we could not read. Where a page hid a figure behind a control we could not operate, the page says so — Capsule shows its annual per-user price by default, for instance, and we could not make its monthly figure appear, so no monthly Capsule price appears here.

No fabricated customers. There are no testimonials on this site, no invented case studies and no example businesses presented as real ones.

How a recommendation differs from an advertisement

Some of the CRMs covered here run referral programmes that pay Firstclient a share if a reader starts a paid plan through a link on this site. Those links are marked sponsored and nofollow and always go through this site's own /go/ path, never a raw tracking URL pasted into a sentence.

Several tools recommended here pay us nothing and never will. Salesforce runs no publisher programme. Less Annoying CRM's affiliate pages do not resolve. HubSpot's programme pays only on paid plans, so every reader who takes our advice and stays on HubSpot's free tools earns this site exactly nothing. Those facts are on the disclosure page in full, because a recommendation you cannot audit is worth very little.

Getting in touch

Corrections are the most useful mail this site receives, particularly on prices: a figure that was right in September may be wrong in November. Write to the counter and say which page and which number.