How this site is paid, and by whom

Firstclient makes money when a reader starts a paid CRM subscription through one of its referral links. That is the whole business model, and it creates an obvious pressure: recommend whatever pays best. This page exists so you can check whether we have given in to it.

The vendors that can pay us

Seven CRMs on this site run referral programmes we can join. Each link to them goes through this site's own /go/ path, carries rel="sponsored nofollow", and is disclosed in the sentence or box it appears in. Programme terms below are as researched on 20 September 2026 and belong to the vendors, not to us.

• HubSpot — an affiliate programme run through Impact, paying a share of subscription revenue for up to twelve months, with a 180-day attribution window. It pays only on paid plans.
• Zoho CRM and Bigin — one in-house Zoho programme covering both, paying a share of first-year revenue with a 90-day window. Zoho's terms require the referred customer to sign up in the same data centre as the referrer, which can silently void a referral across regions.
• Capsule — a programme run through PartnerStack, paying a recurring share for as long as the customer stays.
• EngageBay — an in-house programme paying a recurring share, attributed on first click.
• Pipedrive — a PartnerStack programme paying a share for the first twelve months, with a 90-day window. It is application-only and reviews the site before approving.
• Freshsales — a PartnerStack programme relaunched in February 2026, advertising "up to 30%" with the tier grid visible only after approval.

Until a programme is approved and issues this site its own tracking link, the /go/ path points at the vendor's ordinary homepage. Nothing on this site has been written differently because of a payout, and nothing changes in a page when a link is swapped.

The vendors that pay us nothing

These are on the site because they are the right answer for somebody, and they are worth naming precisely because they earn us nothing.

• HubSpot's free tools pay nothing. HubSpot's programme pays on paid plans only, so a reader who follows our advice, opens HubSpot's free CRM and stays there forever is worth exactly zero to this site. We still recommend it as the easiest first CRM.
• Salesforce runs no publisher programme at all — its partner routes are for consultancies and resellers. It is named on this site only as an editorial reference point and is never linked through /go/.
• Less Annoying CRM has no affiliate programme we can reach; the pages that would describe one do not resolve. It is still the recommendation for a very small team that wants a CRM they can finish setting up in an afternoon.
• A spreadsheet. Where the honest answer is that a business does not need a CRM yet, this site says so, and nobody pays us for that either.

Rules this site keeps

1. No coupon or discount blocks. Several of these programmes forbid them, and the rest should. Where a vendor publishes a real saving on its own page — Zoho's annual price against its monthly one, for example — we quote it as the vendor's published price with the date, never as a code from us.
2. No paid placements. No vendor has been offered, or has bought, a position on any list here.
3. No bidding on vendor brand names. This site runs no paid search at all.
4. No self-referral. Nobody here signs up through our own links.
5. Refusals are published, not quietly reversed. Salesforce and Less Annoying CRM are named above as unmonetised on purpose. If that ever changes, this page changes first and says when.

How to check us

Take any ranking on this site and compare the order against the list above. If the tools that pay best were always the tools at the top, you should stop trusting the ranking — and on the small-business CRM ranking, the second and fifth places are held by HubSpot's free tier and Less Annoying CRM, which between them pay us nothing.