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Set up a free CRM: accounts, contacts and deals in one afternoon

By the Onsites AI team · Last updated August 28, 2026 · 8-minute read

"CRM" is where software pricing goes to mislead. Standalone CRMs price per seat per month for a database; suites bolt one on at extra cost; and the whole category pretends that the support inbox and the sales pipeline are different databases. They are not. In Onsites AI the CRM is part of the permanently free plan, conversations link themselves to customer records, and quotes, orders and invoices come out of the same editor. This guide sets all that up in one afternoon.

Start from what you already have

Your customer list already exists in some form — a spreadsheet export, an old tool, a stack of email threads. Import accounts and contacts from CSV and the records exist; perfection is not required on day one. The part that actually pays is what happens next: every customer who writes in has their conversation auto-linked to their record, so the CRM fills itself as your inbox fills, forever after, with zero data-entry discipline demanded of anyone.

Build the pipeline you actually run

Three to five opportunity stages beat fifteen every time, because a pipeline you have to think about is a pipeline people lie to. If your real motion is "asked → we sent a quote → they paid," build exactly those stages with real deal values. The customer context panel is where this earns its keep: while you answer a support conversation, the account's open opportunities are on the same screen — which is how a shipping complaint and a renewal conversation become one coherent reply instead of two contradictory ones.

From conversation to quote to invoice, no re-keying

Onsites Mail is the document side of the same database: quotes, orders, invoices and contracts from one editor, over a shared product catalog with status transitions that show where any document stands. The workflow that used to be five tools is one thread: conversation opens the record, quote goes out of the same screen, the quote becomes an order and an invoice without retyping a line. AI can polish the wording of any document or reply (3–6 credits an action) — opt-in, prepaid, capped by the spend levers in the cost guide.

The hygiene that keeps it valuable

• One naming rule, enforced at import. "Acmé Corp" everywhere, not "ACME srl" in contacts and "Acme s.r.l." in accounts. Ten minutes now, a clean report forever.
• Tags on opportunities, not free-text notes. A tag like renewal-q4 is filterable; a paragraph is not.
• Summaries, not memory. A 6-credit conversation summary hands the next teammate the thread's state without a five-minute scroll.
• Let visitor tracking open the file. A visitor on the pricing page who then chats is an opportunity with a paper trail before anyone types a thing.
• Archive on a schedule, not on a scare. The Friday export is the whole policy: free-tier workspaces are not backed up server-side, so the export you keep is the backup you have.

What it costs, precisely

Nothing, in most cases, ever: the CRM is included in the free cloud plan — full software, 3 seats and 100 MB, no CRM upsell exists to buy. Seats past the third are $15/seat/month; storage beyond 100 MB is $1/GB/month in packs; AI is prepaid credits that never expire. The pricing page shows every meter with a calculator, and if you need customers' data to never leave your own network, the whole suite — desk, CRM, documents — runs self-hosted on your infrastructure. When you get to migrating your desk and its history into the same system, the migration guide picks up exactly there.

The first-week ritual that keeps the data alive

One light ritual per week is the whole maintenance contract. Monday, five minutes on intent tags: what did customers actually ask about last week, and did an intent spike? Midweek, one pass over open opportunities: which two deals move if the account hears from us today — the context panel makes that a filter, not a research project. Friday, one export from settings: on the free tier, server-side backups are not automatic, so the export is the backup — ten seconds that make the workspace's data yours in the literal sense. Three sittings, ten minutes; the discipline stays small because the database does the remembering.

When the CRM earns its keep

Look for the small moments rather than the monthly report. A renewal call that opens with last week's support thread because the thread is on the record. A quote leaving the reply screen without one retyped line item, thanks to the shared catalog. A pricing-page visitor whose record already holds two conversations before anyone picks up the phone. None of these asked the team to change how they work — each is what the auto-linking produces quietly in the background. That is the honest promise of a CRM bolted to the desk: not adoption ceremonies, but records that assemble themselves from the work the team was doing anyway. It is also, not incidentally, the reason it ships inside the free plan instead of as the upsell.