The spreadsheet has four columns: brand name, contact, stage, last touch. It worked at fifteen rows. At ninety it holds three versions of the same agency under slightly different spellings, a stage cell still reading “waiting to hear back” on a conversation that went quiet in June, and no reliable way to see which five brands are owed a follow up this week. That is when a creator or a two person agency goes looking for a CRM, and when the phrase “free CRM” starts carrying more weight than it can hold.
The spreadsheet breaks before the deal count does
Free CRM is not a single offer. It is at least four offers wearing the same label, and the difference is not the price. It is the noun being counted. Some plans meter logged in users, so the ceiling is seats. Some meter unique people or companies, so the ceiling is contacts. Some meter every row of data you enter anywhere in the product, so the ceiling is records and a note costs the same as a person. Some meter open items in a pipeline, so the ceiling is leads.
Those meters fill at wildly different rates for identical activity. A month of outreach that consumes forty units under one counting rule can consume two hundred and forty under another, from the same emails and the same follow ups. The vendor is not hiding this. It is on the pricing page, usually in a tooltip beside the number. Most people read the number and not the noun, migrate the spreadsheet, and meet the definition in week six of a campaign.
What follows is what seven vendors state on their own pricing pages, fetched on 6 September 2026. Two publish no free CRM plan on those pages at all.
What each vendor’s free or entry tier actually meters
| Vendor | Plan named on the page | What the page meters | Stated cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho CRM | Free | Users | 3 users, stated as “free forever for 3 users”. No contact or record ceiling listed. |
| Bigin by Zoho | Free | Records, defined as each row entered across Contacts, Companies, Pipelines, Activities, Products and Notes | 500 records, and 1 user |
| Copper | Basic (entry paid tier, $29 per seat per month) | Contacts | 2,500 contact limit. Professional lists 15,000 and Business lists unlimited. |
| Close | Solo (entry paid tier) | Leads, where contacts are individuals attached to a lead | Up to 10,000 leads, and limited to 1 user. Essentials and above list unlimited contacts and leads. |
| Freshsales (Freshworks) | Growth (entry paid tier, $9 per user per month billed annually) | Seats. All three published plans are priced per user. | No free plan and no contact or record cap appear on the pricing page. The page offers a 21 day trial. |
| Streak | Pro (entry paid tier) | Seats. All three published plans are priced per user. | No free CRM plan appears on the pricing page. Records are listed as unlimited on every published plan. |
| HubSpot | Free CRM | [EVIDENCE NEEDED] | [EVIDENCE NEEDED: a HubSpot page stating its free tier contact ceiling and marketing contacts allowance in text a plain fetch can read. Both hubspot.com/products/crm and hubspot.com/pricing/crm returned HTTP 200 on 6 September 2026 with no plan limits in the served markup, so no cap is asserted here.] |
A contact, a record and a lead are not the same currency
Bigin publishes the most explicit definition of the three, and it is the one that surprises people. Its pricing page states that each row of data entered across Pipelines, Contacts, Activities and Notes counts as a record, and its FAQ extends that list to Contacts, Companies, Pipelines, Activities, Products and Notes. Read it against a real conversation. The brand becomes a company row. The marketing manager becomes a contact row. The opportunity becomes a pipeline row. The call you logged and the note you wrote after it are two more. One conversation, five records, against a ceiling of five hundred.
Copper’s meter runs the other way. Its Basic tier lists a 2,500 contact limit, and a contact is the unique person or company. Ten follow up notes on the same relationship still leave you at one contact. Activity is free under that rule and only new people cost anything, which suits outreach that is deep rather than wide. Copper also prices per seat while capping contacts, so the data ceiling and the headcount cost move apart.
Close counts a third thing again. Its comparison table meters leads, and defines contacts as individuals within an organization attached to a lead. The metered object is closer to the brand than to the person, so adding a second and third stakeholder at one company does not advance it. What the page does not say is whether a lead marked closed lost releases its slot back to the 10,000 allowance or holds it permanently. That decides whether the cap is a rate limit or a lifetime total. [EVIDENCE NEEDED: Close documentation stating whether closed leads continue to count against the Solo plan’s 10,000 lead limit.]
Zoho CRM’s free edition sits outside all of this. The meter is three users, and the page lists no contact or record ceiling against them. For one person that is close to an unbounded data allowance, a different shape of offer from a 500 record or 2,500 contact ceiling. The plan does not degrade as you get busier, it degrades when you hire. Bigin’s free plan makes the opposite trade: one user, and a hard floor of 500 records.
Running the numbers on one busy outreach month
The following is illustrative, not a case study and not a real business. Suppose a creator opens 40 new brand conversations in a month, logs one company and one contact for each, opens one deal, and records three activities or notes per conversation.
Under Bigin’s counting rule that is 1 company plus 1 contact plus 1 pipeline row plus 3 activity or note rows, so 6 records per conversation. Forty conversations produce 240 records. The 500 record free ceiling is reached partway through the second month at that pace, and it is reached by activity, not by deal count.
Under Copper’s rule the same month produces 40 contacts, because the notes and the deal cost nothing. Against the Basic tier’s 2,500 contact limit that is roughly 62 months of identical volume, and half that if every brand yields two named people.
Under Close’s rule the month produces 40 leads against the Solo plan’s 10,000, which is not a ceiling any solo creator reaches on outreach volume. The binding constraint on that plan is the single user limit.
Under Zoho CRM’s free edition the month moves no meter at all, because the meter is logins. On Freshsales and Streak the question does not arise, since neither pricing page publishes a free CRM plan and every seat is billed from the first. Substitute your own conversation count and your own notes per deal and the ordering changes with it, which is the argument for doing the arithmetic before the migration rather than after.
Questions to ask before importing the spreadsheet
- Does an inbound reply create a record automatically, or only a manual entry? Under a record based meter, automatic creation from an inbox is the difference between 6 records per conversation and considerably more.
- Does the tier count closed won and closed lost items against the cap, or only open ones? None of the pricing pages checked here answered this. Put the question to the vendor’s own help documentation.
- What happens at the ceiling? Read only lock, blocked new rows, or a grace period before a forced upgrade are three very different outcomes mid campaign, and none of the seven pages stated which applies.
- Is the plan priced per seat? Copper, Close, Freshsales and Streak all publish per seat pricing, so a second login doubles the cost even when data volume has not moved. Zoho CRM’s free edition admits three users at no cost.
- Does the cap you are planning around appear on the vendor’s current pricing page in its own words? If the number came from a comparison article, it is not verified.
Where the CRM sits relative to the rest of the deal
The deal tracked in a CRM is usually the same deal that later becomes a signed agreement and then an invoice, and each step is metered by a tool with its own counted noun. This blog has worked through the other two: what counts as a document under free plan ceilings in e-signature tools for creator agreements, and what fills up first in invoicing tools for social media freelancers. The same argument runs through response-metered form tools, where a campaign spike rather than a price change is what moves a plan.
This piece is about contact and pipeline tracking specifically. Document signing and billing software are separate categories with separate meters, covered in those posts rather than repeated here.
FAQ
Is a seat-metered free CRM better for a solo creator than a contact-metered one?
For one person it usually lasts longer. Zoho CRM’s free edition admits three users and lists no contact or record ceiling against them, so outreach volume alone will not end it. Bigin’s free plan takes the opposite trade at one user and 500 records, which a busy month can consume. The seat model stops scaling the moment a second person needs a login, and the comparison inverts there.
What happens when a free CRM tier hits its cap?
It varies by vendor, and none of the seven pricing pages checked on 6 September 2026 stated the behaviour. The candidates are a read only lock, a block on new rows with existing data still usable, or a forced upgrade with a grace period. Those differ materially if the cap arrives mid campaign, so confirm it from the vendor’s own help documentation first.
Sources
- Zoho CRM pricing, fetched 6 September 2026. Free edition stated as free forever for 3 users.
- Bigin by Zoho pricing, fetched 6 September 2026. Free plan stated at 500 records and 1 user, with the record definition given on the page.
- Copper pricing, fetched 6 September 2026. Basic listed at $29 per seat per month with a 2,500 contact limit.
- Close pricing, fetched 6 September 2026. Solo listed as limited to 1 user and 10k leads, with leads metered up to 10,000 in the comparison table.
- Freshsales pricing, fetched 6 September 2026. Three per user plans from Growth at $9 per user per month billed annually, a 21 day trial, no free plan shown.
- Streak pricing, fetched 6 September 2026. Three per user plans, records unlimited on each, no free CRM plan shown.
Prices and plan limits above were verified on the vendors’ own pricing pages on 6 September 2026 and are accurate as of that date only. This is not Watchdog data and is not on the re-verification schedule, so confirm any figure against the vendor’s current page before acting on it. followedapp is published by the team behind RecurPost, and RecurPost is covered vendor #34 under the same rules as every other vendor.