Most CRM landing pages list the people they're for. That list always grows over time, because growing the list grows the addressable market, and growing the addressable market is what software companies are supposed to do. Three years in, the page says the product is for everyone from a freelance plumber to a mid-market SaaS sales team. Both can't be true. One of them is wrong.
I'd rather be the other kind of CRM. So this is the list of people FlatCRM is not for. If you're in any of these, please don't sign up. Use the tool I name. We don't take it personally and you'll get more done.
1. You're running outbound prospecting
If your day looks like "import 3,000 leads from a list-buy or scraper, run them through a multi-step email sequence, score replies, route the warm ones to a closer" — FlatCRM is the wrong shape. Three things break:
- The 500-contact cap on Solo (2,000 on Pair) is incompatible with importing a fresh prospecting list every month.
- We don't ship a sequence engine. No drip, no follow-up timer, no A/B subject lines.
- We don't ship lead-scoring or deal-routing rules. There's nothing to assign a hot lead to, because the team is two people.
The right tools. Apollo for the data + sequencing combo at the lower end. Instantly or Smartlead if you want pure cold-email infrastructure. HubSpot Sales Hub if you have budget and want one polished system. Pipedrive with the LeadBooster add-on if you want a CRM-first shape with sequences bolted on.
2. You have more than two people who need to see the pipeline
Pair caps at two seats. That's not a starter limit we'll lift later — it's the shape. Three salespeople running a shared pipeline need things we don't ship: lead routing, territory rules, deal handoffs, manager rollups, forecast confidence, weighted-pipeline reports, leaderboard views.
You could fake some of this with three people sharing one Pair workspace and a naming convention. Don't. Six months in, you'll have a [JK] prefix on every deal title and a Slack thread arguing about whose contact got assigned wrong.
The right tools. Pipedrive Team plan is the cheapest honest answer at $24/seat/month. HubSpot Sales Hub Pro at $90/seat/month if you want polish and don't mind the upsell pressure. Salesforce Starter at $25/seat/month if you have a Salesforce admin in the family.
3. You need pipeline forecasting or revenue analytics
Forecasting in the modern sense means: weighted pipeline, win-rate by stage, average sales cycle, conversion funnel between stages, MRR-by-cohort, deals-stuck-in-stage alerts. We ship none of it. Your /app/deals board has counts and totals per column and that's the analytics layer.
We don't think the small team you're imagining benefits from the analytics suite. Two people running 30 deals can read 30 deals. The forecasting math becomes useful around 200+ open deals, which is well past our shape.
The right tools. HubSpot for full reporting at the polished end. Close for a sales-team-first shape with forecasting built in. Salesforce if you want every report in the world and have an ops person to build them.
4. You're tracking newsletter subscribers
I see this one a lot in research calls. "We have 4,000 newsletter subs, can we put them in your CRM?" You can technically import them, you'll hit the cap on the first attempt, and even if you bumped to a hypothetical higher tier — which we won't ship — the data shape is wrong.
Newsletter subscribers aren't contacts in a CRM sense. They're recipients. The fields you care about are subscription source, opt-in date, last open, last click, list segment, unsubscribe reason. None of that is in our schema. None of it should be.
The right tools. Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Substack, Buttondown. Pick on sending pattern: Beehiiv for growth-focused publishing, Buttondown for plain-text indie, Mailchimp for the long tail, Substack if you want the platform's recommendation engine.
5. You're a recruiter or staffing agency
Recruiting pipelines look like sales pipelines but they break in three places: the number of candidates, the stage shape, and the artifact attachment.
A junior recruiter handles 200+ live candidates per role per week. Even Pair's 2,000-contact cap evaporates after a single month of sourcing. Stage names also don't map — "applied / screened / interview / offer / hired" isn't "lead / qualified / proposal / won." And resumes need to be searchable, not just attached.
The right tools. Workable, Greenhouse, Recruitee, Lever. If you're at the very small end and don't want a full ATS, Notion with a candidates database is what most freelance recruiters actually use.
6. You need integrations beyond email
We attach inbound email to contacts (forward to the workspace inbox; threads land on the matching contact's page). We don't ship a marketplace of 200 integrations. There's no Salesforce sync, no QuickBooks two-way, no Calendly auto-creation, no Slack lead-channel posting, no Zapier sink for "when a deal closes, fire X." We won't ship those during v1, and most of them will not be on the W12 roadmap either.
If your workflow today already crosses three SaaS tools with sync between them, you're built into a shape that needs the marketplace. Don't try to compress it into ours.
The right tools. HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Salesforce — all three have a real marketplace. Folk and Attio are smaller-feeling but still ship Zapier / Make integration paths.
7. You need it on mobile
There's no FlatCRM mobile app. The web app responds to small screens — you can read a contact, mark a task done, leave a note — but it's not a native experience. No push notifications, no offline cache, no widgets, no business-card scanning, no on-the-road dialer.
If your sales motion is field-based — visiting clients, in-person meetings, conferences, route-driving — you'll be unhappy with us by week two.
The right tools. Pipedrive and HubSpot have polished mobile apps. Copper lives inside Gmail and works well on phones. Less Annoying CRM ships a mobile app and is a fair shape match.
8. You need a dialer, SMS, sequencer, or calendar engine
We don't have any of these. We attach calls only as activity-log notes you type yourself. There's no click-to-call, no auto-logging, no SMS thread view, no calendar slot picker your prospects can use, no in-app meeting scheduler. The closest we come is "you can paste your Calendly link into a contact note and find it later."
The right tools. Aircall or Dialpad for dialing. TextMagic for SMS. Calendly, Cal.com, or SavvyCal for scheduling. Mailshake or Lemlist for sequences. The CRM you eventually pick to bind these together is going to be HubSpot or Pipedrive — not us.
So who is it for
The shorthand: a one or two-person operator who has fewer than 500 (or 2,000) people they actually talk to in a year, who closes deals over conversation, and who wants the pipeline to fit on one screen. Solo consultants. Freelance designers and agencies up to two seats. Small accounting and law practices. Solo therapists with a referral pipeline. Independent recruiters with a small loyal client roster (not a sourcing machine). One-person SaaS founders selling into mid-market manually. The kind of operator who would happily run their CRM in a Google Sheet for two more years if a CRM didn't exist.
That's it. That's the shape.
If you're not in that shape, please use the tool I named. There's no animosity in it — most of those tools are run by people I'd happily get coffee with. Software is the right size for its shape, or it isn't, and pretending otherwise costs the customer more than it costs the vendor.
— FlatCRM
If you read all of that and you're still in the shape, start the trial. $19/month flat, 14 days free, 500 contacts. Or read why we capped it.