Groundbase
Attio
Salesflare
OnePageCRM
Capsule CRM
Nimble
Flowlu
Twenty
Notion
Asana
Trello
Obsidian.md
ClickUp
Evernote
Todoist
monday.com
Groundbase is a CRM built for technical solo operators โ solo founders, indie hackers, freelance developers, and agencies of one.
Flat $9/month. No per-seat pricing, no tiers, no upsells, no "contact sales."
You connect your own Twilio account for SMS and voice, and your own Resend account for email. Your cost per message is whatever those providers charge you โ Groundbase takes no markup and doesn't sit between you and your vendors. A CRM that resells you SMS at 5x cost is a CRM with a conflict of interest.
Groundbase ships a Model Context Protocol server. Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client can read and act on your CRM data directly โ list contacts, create deals, send SMS, build workflows, all from your AI assistant. Most CRMs bolt a chat sidebar onto their UI. Groundbase exposes the data and lets you bring your own model.
Contacts and companies ยท Deal pipeline with drag-and-drop kanban ยท Tasks and calendar ยท Bulk SMS ยท Softphone and voicemail drops ยท Email campaigns with drip sequences and A/B testing ยท Multi-step cadences ยท Automations, workflows, and webhooks ยท Custom fields and saved views ยท CSV import/export ยท Google Calendar sync ยท Public booking pages
Available on web, Windows desktop, and Android.
Enterprise sales teams. There's no SSO, no lead routing, no approval workflows, and no SOC 2. If you have SDRs and a RevOps person, use HubSpot or Salesforce โ they're better at that job.
Built and maintained by one person.
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Groundbase's answer
Two things.
First, BYO infrastructure. You connect your own Twilio account and your own Resend account. Your cost per SMS is whatever Twilio bills you, on an invoice with your name on it. I don't mark it up and I don't sit between you and your vendors. Most CRMs that offer SMS set their own rate, and you have no way to audit it.
Second, it has an MCP server. Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client can read your contacts, create deals, send SMS, and build workflows using your real data. I didn't bolt a chat sidebar onto the UI. I exposed the data and let you bring whatever AI you already pay for.
Also $9 a month, flat. One plan. No per-seat, no tiers, nothing gated behind an upgrade.
Groundbase's answer
Technical solo operators. Solo founders, indie hackers, freelance developers, agencies of one.
Concretely: someone who reads "bring your own Twilio account" and thinks "good, I want control" instead of "ugh, more setup." Someone who already knows what an API key is and where to find it. Someone who'd rather assemble a few sharp tools than buy one bundled platform that's mediocre at everything.
If "Twilio account SID" makes you nauseous, this isn't the right tool and I'd rather say so now. Zoho Bigin or HubSpot's free tier will treat you better.
Groundbase's answer
I built the CRM I wanted and couldn't find. Everything out there either assumed I had a sales team I don't have, or was the cheap entry tier of someone else's upsell funnel.
The part worth telling is what I removed. Groundbase originally had a credits system. Customers topped up a wallet, sent SMS through my master Twilio account, and I marked up the rate. That was supposed to be platform revenue.
I killed it. A few reasons: A2P 10DLC compliance for a multi-tenant setup is brutal for one person, every credits system generates "where did my $10 go" support emails, and refund accounting on partial balances is miserable.
But the real reason was simpler. I built this to get away from platforms that mark up Twilio, and there I was marking up Twilio. So customers connect their own account now. I lost the markup revenue and got back a product I'd actually buy.
Groundbase's answer
Cloudflare Workers for the backend and API. Turso (libSQL) for the database. Stripe for billing. Twilio for SMS and voice, though that runs on the customer's own account, not mine. Resend for email, same arrangement.
The web app is React on Vite. Desktop is Electron with a local SQLite store. Mobile is React Native. The MCP server is a separate Worker speaking Streamable HTTP.
No framework on the backend, just TypeScript and the Workers runtime. The marketing site runs on Vercel. Everything else, the API, the app, and the MCP server, is on Cloudflare Workers, mostly for the cost curve. At $9 a month with thin margins, a bandwidth bill that scales on multiple axes is a real problem.
Groundbase's answer
Depends who you are, and for a lot of people the honest answer is you shouldn't.
If you run a sales team, use HubSpot or Close. They're built for that and I'm not. No lead routing, no approval workflows, no SSO, no SOC 2.
If you're one person, the math changes, because the tier where the useful things live is never the cheap one. HubSpot Sales Hub Professional, where sequences and real automation sit, is $90 per seat per month on annual billing plus a required one-time $1,500 onboarding fee. Close Growth, the tier that unlocks the Power Dialer, is $99 per seat per month annually. Groundbase is $9, one plan, nothing gated behind an upgrade.
Then there's messaging cost. With bundled telephony you pay whatever rate the platform sets and you have no way to audit it. With Groundbase you connect your own Twilio account and the bill arrives with your name on it.
It's been very very helpful to streamline different people on our team, especially remote workers to help them understand what's going on in our business without 100s of meetings.
My remote-first start-up has eliminated more than 200+ hours of meetings and 1000s of mismanaged documents because our entire communication happens through Notion.
As someone who's always on the lookout for the perfect productivity app, I was excited to try out Notion. It promises to be an all-in-one tool for everything from note-taking to project management to personal wikis.
From the moment you open Notion, you can tell that it's different from other productivity apps. The interface is sleek and modern, and it's easy to navigate. The app is divided into pages, which can be customized with different templates to fit your needs. You can create to-do lists, databases, wikis, calendars, and more.
One of the things I love about Notion is the ability to create relationships between pages. For example, you can create a database of your favorite books and then link to a page with your book reviews. Or you can create a to-do list and link to a page with notes about the task. This feature makes it easy to keep all of your information in one place and to connect related items.
Based on our record, Notion seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 441 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.
Two of the most popular open source note taking app are affine (basically notion but open source) and obsidian (which stores notes in markdown). - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
Notion | https://notion.so | Android Engineer | SF | hybrid (in office 2x a week) | Full time- Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years agoLevel: Mid/Mid+ (4-6yrs experience).
Advanced Notion and Google Doc writing editor. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
I manage my non-work and work-adjacent tasks in Notion. Whenever I have an idea, regardless of how big or small or silly or achievable it is, I'll add it to Notion, and use labels to categorise it by type of output (e.g. blog, silly project, website update). Today I wanted to write a short post for my site. I clicked on the filtered blog post view, and selected this one (because I hoped it would be a quick one!). - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
Notion.so redefines workspaces. With its intelligent organization and collaboration features, it's more than a productivity toolโit's a digital haven. Discover the art of streamlined and efficient teamwork. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
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Trello - Infinitely flexible. Incredibly easy to use. Great mobile apps. It's free. Trello keeps track of everything, from the big picture to the minute details.
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Obsidian.md - A second brain, for you, forever. Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.