A free CRM for two people, and an honest account of what it leaves out
TicAte CRM is free for two seats with no trial clock — real pipelines, contacts and deals. What the free plan includes, and when you have outgrown it.
Most "free CRM" offers are a trial wearing a costume: thirty days, or a seat count so low the product cannot be used, or a free tier that quietly stops letting you export. Here is what ours actually is, and where it stops.
What free means here
Two seats, indefinitely. No card, no countdown, no feature that disappears on day thirty-one. Two people can run their sales on it for a year if that is what the business needs.
You get:
- Leads, contacts, companies and deals — a real customer record, not a notes field
- One pipeline, with stages you name and reorder yourself
- Tasks, activities and the timeline of what changed and who changed it
- 1 GB of file storage
- Your own address, and your own database schema — the same isolation a paying customer gets
That last point is the one we would not compromise on. Free accounts are not rows in a shared table with a tenant column on them; they get a schema of their own, like everybody else. Isolation is the database's job, not a filter in the code that one missing clause can defeat.
What it does not include
Being straight about this is cheaper for both of us than a disappointed signup:
- No automation rules. Nothing fires on a stage change. Follow-ups are yours to remember.
- One pipeline only. If you sell two different ways, you will feel this quickly.
- No custom fields or sections on the cards.
- No quotes or invoices. Those live on Standard.
- No native join to TicAte WhatsApp or ChatIQ — the conversation and the customer record stay separate.
The honest moment to start paying
Not when a salesperson tells you to. When the manual version costs more than the plan.
In practice that is one of three moments:
- A third person joins. Two people can hold a shared understanding in their heads. Three cannot, and the day someone double-calls a customer is the day the free plan ended.
- You forget a follow-up that mattered. One missed quote usually costs more than a year of Standard.
- You start selling in two different ways — direct and through partners, or new business and renewals. One pipeline stops describing reality.
Standard is ₹299 per seat a month paid annually at launch pricing. For two people that is less than most teams spend on coffee in a week, which is roughly the right comparison for software that stops you forgetting a deal.
Starting on free is not a trap
Moving up a tier is a setting, not a migration. Your records, your pipeline and your history stay exactly as they are; the limits lift. And because the data was never in a shared table, nothing has to be untangled from anyone else's.
If you are weighing it against the obvious alternatives, what makes this CRM different is the more useful read — the free tier is an on-ramp, not the argument.
