The Quote You Forgot to Chase Is the One That Cost You the Job
PHIT Simple CRM is one file that tracks every quote you have out, who is overdue a call, and which customers have nothing scheduled at all. Use it in your browser or download it and run it with the wifi off. Free forever, and nobody can lock you out of it.
No account. No email. Nothing you type is ever uploaded.
This is the whole product, not a teaser
Four screens: Today, Pipeline, List and Money. Open it above and it loads with sample leads so you can see how it feels before you type anything real.
A sketch of the Today screen. The real one has a phone, text and email button on every row.
The four buckets
Overdue, due today, rest of the week, and nothing scheduled. That last column is sorted biggest dollar first, because that is where the money quietly walks out.
Call, text, email in one tap
Every row has live tel:, sms: and mailto: buttons, and tapping one writes it into that customer's activity log. Works offline, works on a phone.
Won and lost with reasons
Won asks the final job total. Lost asks why. That is what turns the Money screen into a real report instead of a list.
Money that means something
Win rate, average ticket, revenue won by month, and revenue by lead source. The last one is the number that tells you where to spend.
Maintenance due
Last service date plus your interval gives you a due-now and due-in-30-days list. Quarterly HVAC, monthly cleans, annual gutter work.
Search that finds things
Name, phone, address, notes, tags, all as you type. Filter by stage, source, tag, or "show me everything with no next action."
Calendar and paper
Export follow-ups as an .ics file and they land in whatever calendar you already use. Print today's call list with a tick box per row, or a route-order day sheet.
Your data, four ways out
JSON backup and restore, CSV export, CSV import from whatever you are leaving, and a button that hands you the app file itself.
Saved only on this device, in this browser. Never uploaded. Once the page has loaded, the app file makes zero network requests, which is why it keeps working in a basement with no signal.
What is PHIT Simple CRM? It is a free lead and follow-up tracker for one to three person service businesses, delivered as a single HTML file. Open it in any browser, or download it and run it with no internet at all. Everything saves on your own computer and nothing is ever uploaded, because there is no server behind it.
What it replaces: the $49 to $325 a month subscription that a solo contractor is really paying for one feature, which is knowing who to call today. It tracks customer, address, service quoted, price, date sent, next follow-up date, status and notes, plus win rate, average ticket and revenue by lead source. What it does not replace: card payments, crew dispatch, GPS, or two people working in the same records at the same time. Those need a paid tool and this page will tell you which.
Want it on your desktop? Download the file. Same app, works with the wifi off.
The rest of the free tools
Why do quotes go cold when the work was already won?
Almost nobody loses a job on price alone. They lose it on silence.
Here is how it actually goes, in the words of a contractor on r/lawncare: "they say 'sounds good, I'll let you know' — then you're out mowing, driving, answering calls, dealing with weather, and the follow-up gets forgotten." The quote is sitting in your sent folder. The customer is waiting for you to call. Nine days go by. Somebody else calls them first.
That thread also wrote the spec for what a follow-up tracker needs, and it is short: customer, address, service quoted, price, date sent, next follow-up date, status, notes. Status can be as simple as sent, followed up, won, dead. That is the whole job. Jobber sells the same thing on its Connect tier at $139 a month as of August 2026, because automated quote follow-ups do not exist on the cheaper plan.
Now put a number on it. Say you send twelve quotes a month at an average of $2,400, and you close a third of them. That is $9,600 of work booked. If three of those twelve go cold purely because nobody called back, and you would have won one of them, that is $2,400 gone that month, $28,800 over a year, on work you had already done the driving and the measuring for. The estimate was free. Losing it was not.
The second half of the problem is the one nobody tracks, and it is the reason this app has a purple column. A lead with an overdue follow-up at least shows up as a problem. A lead with no follow-up date at all is invisible. It does not nag anyone. It does not appear on a list. It just sits in the pipeline looking like an asset while it rots. On the Today screen those leads get their own column, sorted with the biggest dollar figure at the top, and the app tells you when you save a new lead without a date. It is meant to be slightly annoying.
There is a related leak on the sending side worth knowing about. A Jobber user reported that "Over 60% of my estimates aren't even viewed by clients. The emails are sent from a generic Jobber domain (jobbermail.com), which most clients ignore." If you are going to chase a quote, it helps if the quote arrived. Sending the PDF yourself, from your own address, costs nothing and gets opened.
What do the paid CRMs actually cost in 2026?
List prices as of August 2026, taken from the vendors' own pricing pages. Every one of these does things this free file cannot, and the last column says what.
| Product | Price (Aug 2026) | The catch | What it does better than us |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jobber | Core $49/mo monthly, $39 annual, 1 user. Connect $139. Grow $199. Plus $499 for 5 users. Extra users $29/mo each | Core went from $39 to $49 in July 2026, a 25.6% rise. Automated quote follow-ups and expense tracking sit on higher tiers. Mid-term downgrades are not allowed | Real scheduling, invoicing, card and ACH payments at 2.9% + 30¢, automated client reminders, and a phone app the crew can actually use |
| Housecall Pro | Basic $79/mo monthly, $59 annual, 1 user and you cannot add one. Essentials $189 (up to 5). MAX $329 (up to 8), then +$35/user | Basic has no QuickBooks sync and no GPS. Sales Proposals is $40/mo extra, vehicle GPS $20 per vehicle, Price Book $149/mo. Cancelling requires a phone call | Dispatch, live technician tracking, consumer financing, online booking, and a genuinely good mobile experience |
| Workiz | Lite free for 2 users. Kickstart $225/mo. Standard $275. Pro $325 | QuickBooks sync only from $275/mo. Users report that downgrading or cancelling is very hard once you are in | Built-in phone system with call recording and lead attribution, which is a real edge if the phone is your main channel |
| Markate | $49.95/mo, $39.95 annual, plus $5 per employee per month | Online booking, lead forms, proposals and CompanyCam each cost another $10/mo | The cheapest of the real field-service tools, and per-employee pricing beats per-seat at small crew sizes |
| Service Fusion | Stopped publishing prices in July 2026. Last known: Starter ~$208/mo annual, Plus ~$324, Pro ~$533 | No free plan and no self-serve trial, so you talk to sales to learn the price. A user: "After the third price increase in as many years, despite no new features" | Unlimited users on every plan, which is unusual and genuinely valuable once you are past five people |
| ServiceTitan | No public pricing. Roughly $245–$500 per technician per month, plus $5,000–$15,000 implementation for a 5 to 15 tech shop | 12-month minimum, commonly 2 to 3 years. Annual increases of 5–15% after the initial term | Everything, if you are a 20-truck operation. A user: "the reason they give you 3 months free in the beginning is because it will take minimum 3 months to figure out how to use it" |
| PHIT Simple CRM | $0, no signup, no metering, no limit on leads | One person, one computer. No payments, no dispatch, no sync, no automatic anything. Clearing your browser data wipes it if you have not backed up | You own the file. Nobody can raise the price, change the terms, or lock you out of your own customer list |
Sources, checked August 2026: Jobber, Housecall Pro, Workiz and Markate published pricing pages; Service Fusion last-published pricing before it was withdrawn in July 2026; ServiceTitan figures are reported ranges from customer accounts, since ServiceTitan publishes nothing. Prices in this category move every year, usually upward, so check before you sign anything.
Read that table honestly and a lot of readers should conclude they need the paid one. If you have three trucks, you need dispatch. If you take deposits over the phone, you need a processor. If the office manager and the owner both need to see the same record at the same time, you need a login and a server. None of that is coming from a browser file, and any free tool that tells you otherwise is lying to you.
But look at what the entry tier actually gets you. Jobber Core at $49 a month is one user. Housecall Pro Basic at $79 a month is one user and it will not let you add an employee at any price. If you are a solo operator, you are paying $588 to $948 a year for scheduling and invoicing you may already be doing on paper, plus the one thing you genuinely needed, which was a list of who to call back.
Why does "you own your data" matter more than the monthly price?
The price is the thing people compare. The exit is the thing that hurts.
What actually happens when you cancel, or when you go quiet for a season, is the ugliest part of this whole category. Some real examples, all documented in 2026:
- QuickBooks Online goes read-only for one year after you cancel, then the data is gone. A user on Intuit's own community forum: "I'm cut off from MY DATA!!" Another: "I'm basically stuck — held hostage."
- Joist retired its free plan. Long-time users reported that "customers of 8 yrs can not even log into their account… without having to pay." Eight years of job records behind a paywall that appeared after the fact.
- Zoho Invoice is genuinely free, and it deletes your data after 120 days of inactivity with 20 days' notice. For a seasonal trade that is not a hypothetical. That is January, February, March and half of April.
- BILL, per a user review: "they lock you out of your account, so you do not have access to download your invoices."
- Wave revokes data access immediately on cancellation. FreshBooks users report losing invoice access after cancelling even with paid time remaining.
- Housecall Pro requires a phone call with the account owner to cancel. One review: "I cancelled my subscription 4 times now. I've had to go to my bank to get a credit."
Set against that, "it is a file on your computer" stops sounding like a limitation and starts sounding like the feature. There is no account to close, no retention window, no read-only period, no phone call, no cancellation flow with four screens of offers. If PHIT Web disappeared tomorrow, the copy of the app on your desktop would open on Monday exactly as it did on Friday, because it does not talk to us and never did.
The honest flip side, and we would rather say it than have you find out: local storage is only as safe as your habits. Clear your browser data and it is gone. Use a private window and nothing saves at all. That is why the app has a JSON backup button, why it starts nagging you after seven days without one, and why we would rather you back up weekly than trust a browser. It is the same deal as a paper job book in the truck. Nobody can take it from you, and nobody will save it for you either.
Where is this free CRM genuinely enough?
Be specific about the business shape, because "small business" covers a plumber with a van and a company with forty people.
This is enough if: you are one to three people, one person does the quoting and the chasing, you are sending somewhere under about sixty quotes a month, you invoice by email or on paper, and the customer pays by check, cash, Zelle or a card reader that is not tied to your CRM. If your actual daily problem is "I know I was supposed to call somebody back," this is aimed at you.
This is enough if you only need the maintenance half of it. A comment on r/smallbusiness that could be the design brief for this tool: "Jobber seems to expensive and too big for me. I only need to track maintenance jobs, not to use all CRM stuff." Put in a last service date and an interval, and every customer surfaces when they are due, with a calendar export so the reminder lands where you already look.
You should pay for a real one if: you dispatch two or more crews, you need to see where a truck is, you take card or ACH payments inside the workflow, you want reminders that go out at 6am without you, you need two people in the same records from different devices, or your bookkeeper needs a live QuickBooks feed. Those are all worth money and none of them fit in a browser file.
The middle case: plenty of shops run a paid tool for scheduling and invoicing and are still terrible at quote follow-up, because that feature is on a tier they did not buy. Running this alongside costs nothing and fixes the specific hole.
How do you actually use it?
- Open it, or download it. The button at the top opens it in your browser. The download button hands you the file. Both are the same app, with the same features. The downloaded copy is the one that works in a crawlspace.
- Put in every quote you have out right now. Customer, address, service quoted, price, date you sent it, next follow-up date. Start with the last thirty days. Most people find two or three they had genuinely forgotten, which usually pays for the twenty minutes on the first afternoon.
- Always set a next follow-up date. If you leave it blank the lead drops into the No next action column, sorted biggest first, and the app tells you it did. That column is the scoreboard. Work it to zero.
- Work the Today screen with your coffee. Overdue first, then due today, then the rest of the week. Tap the phone icon, have the conversation, log a line about what was said, set the next date. Two minutes a lead.
- Mark it Won or Lost, and give the loss a reason. Won asks the final total, which is usually not the quoted number. Lost asks why. Six clicks a month and the Money screen turns into a real report on your win rate and which lead source is worth paying for.
- Export a JSON backup every Friday. One click. Keep it in the same folder as your other business files. This is the step people skip and then regret.
If you are coming from another tool, export a CSV from it first and import it here. The importer reads quoted fields, commas and line breaks inside notes, and matches common column headings on its own, so Customer Name, Quote Amount, Follow Up Date and Last Service all land where they should. It shows you exactly how the columns lined up, and which ones it ignored, before it saves anything.
What should you actually track on a quote?
Eight fields, and no more, or you will stop filling them in by week three. This is the r/lawncare list with two additions that earn their place.
| Field | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Customer and address | Also your route. The day sheet prints in the order you set, so the address is doing two jobs |
| Phone and email | One tap to call or text from the follow-up row, and the tap gets logged. On a phone this is the difference between calling back and meaning to |
| Service quoted | In six weeks you will not remember whether the $4,800 was with composite or pressure treated. The customer will |
| Price quoted | Lets the app sort the No next action pile by dollars, so you chase the $7,400 before the $340 |
| Date sent | Turns into "quoted 16 days ago," which is the line that makes you pick up the phone. Also feeds the quote-to-close figure |
| Next follow-up date | The single most important field. Everything on the Today screen is built from it, and leaving it blank is treated as a problem, not a blank |
| Status | New, Contacted, Quoted, Scheduled, Won, Lost. Six is enough. Won and Lost are what make the reports work |
| Notes and activity | Gate codes, the dog, "call after 4," and a dated line for every call, text and email. Nine months later this is what makes you sound like you remember them |
| Lead source (addition) | Cheap to record, and it is the only way to ever answer "is Angi worth it." The Money screen turns it into win rate and revenue per source |
| Last service and interval (addition) | For anything recurring. A user's own words: "after a year it's easy to lose track of who is due for service" |
Follow-up intervals that work in the trades
These are starting points, not rules. The principle underneath them is that a second follow-up closes far more than a first one, and most people never make the second.
| Situation | Next follow-up | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency call, quoted on the spot | Same day, before you leave the street | They are calling three people. First response usually wins |
| Small repair, quoted by email | 2–3 days | Long enough that it is not pushy, short enough that you are still the one they remember |
| Mid-size job, $2k–$10k | Day 3, then day 10, then day 21 | They are getting two other quotes and talking to a spouse. Three touches over three weeks is normal, not annoying |
| Big remodel or commercial bid | Weekly for the first month | Decisions move at committee speed. Being on the call list every week is the entire strategy |
| "Not this year" / bad timing | Set it 6–9 months out and forget it | Costs nothing today. Next spring it appears on the Today screen and you look like you have a memory |
| Lost on price | 90 days | The cheap guy has now done the job. Worth one call |
| Recurring maintenance customer | Interval minus 14 days | Two weeks of lead time is enough to book them without a gap and without a scramble |
The one from that list that pays for itself fastest is "not this year." Almost nobody logs it, because setting a reminder nine months out feels pointless in the moment. It takes four seconds and it is the closest thing to free work in this trade.
Reading the Money screen without kidding yourself
Four numbers, and what each one is actually telling you.
- Win rate is won divided by won plus lost. Leads still sitting open do not count either way, which is the whole point. If your win rate looks great it is often because you never mark anything Lost, and a quote from March that nobody has touched is a loss whatever the pipeline says.
- Average ticket uses the final job total, not the quoted one, because change orders and "while you're here" work are real money and the quote never includes them. Watch the gap between the two. If final is consistently under quoted, you are discounting on the phone without deciding to.
- Revenue won by month is dated by the day you marked it Won, not by when you got paid. Construction days sales outstanding runs about 83 days against roughly 60 across all industries, so the cash lands a season after this chart says it did. Read it as demand, not as your bank balance.
- Revenue by lead source is the one to act on. A source with eight leads, a 60% win rate and a $3,000 average ticket is worth more than one with thirty leads at 10% and $600. Volume flatters a bad channel. Once you have that number, put it through the lead cost calculator to see what a booked job from it actually costs you.
Give it two or three months before you trust any of it. Ten closed jobs is a story, not a statistic, and one big remodel will bend an average ticket right out of shape.
What the app cannot do, in plain terms
No card payments, no ACH, no invoicing built in, no crew scheduling, no GPS, no automated texts or emails, no sync between two computers, no phone app in an app store, no login, no permissions, no audit trail. It does not know about tax, it does not talk to QuickBooks, and it will not stop two people from overwriting each other because it has no idea there are two of you.
It is also worth saying plainly that faster software does not fix a scope argument. CompanyCam put it better than we could: "Faster invoicing software cannot resolve a scope disagreement." The tool that keeps you out of trouble is the document you both agreed to, which is why the estimate generator and the contract generator exist alongside this.
Common questions
Is this CRM really free?
Yes. No trial, no paid tier, no card on file, no limit on how many leads you put in it. The whole CRM is one HTML file that runs in your browser. There is nothing to upgrade to, because this is the whole product.
Where is my data stored?
In your browser's local storage, on your own computer. Nothing you type is ever uploaded, because there is no server to upload it to. The file makes zero network requests once it has loaded. Use Export JSON any time to save a backup file you control.
What happens if I clear my browser data?
Clearing site data wipes the CRM's storage too, and so does using a private window. That is the real risk with this tool and we would rather say it than hide it. Export a JSON backup once a week. It is one click, Import brings everything back exactly as it was, and the app nags you if it has been more than seven days.
Can my whole crew use it?
No. It is built for one person on one computer. There is no login and no syncing, so two people working at the same time would overwrite each other. One owner, or one office manager running the pipeline from one machine, is the shape this fits. If you need three people in the same records at once, you need a paid tool.
Does it work offline?
Yes, completely. Download the file and it runs from your desktop with the wifi off. Saving, searching, filtering, exporting, importing, printing and the calendar export all work with no internet. It never phones home, so there is no outage that can take it from you and no login screen to fail in a crawlspace.
Can I get my leads back out of it?
Any time, in two formats, with no upgrade and no support ticket. Export JSON gives you the complete record including every activity log entry. Export CSV opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. There is also a calendar export that drops your follow-ups into whatever calendar you already use as .ics reminders.
Can I import my leads from another CRM?
Yes. Export a CSV from whatever you are leaving and drop it in. It reads quoted fields, commas inside notes and multi-line notes, and it matches common column names on its own, so Customer Name, Quote Amount and Follow Up Date all land in the right place. You see a preview of how the columns lined up before anything is saved.
How is this different from a spreadsheet?
A spreadsheet will not tell you who to call this morning. This sorts every open lead into overdue, due today, due this week and nothing scheduled, and puts the biggest dollar figure at the top of the pile that has no next action. It also keeps a dated activity log per customer, tracks won and lost with reasons, and works out your win rate and revenue by lead source without a single formula.
Who should pay for Jobber or Housecall Pro instead?
Anyone who needs to take card payments, dispatch a crew, see where the trucks are, send automated reminders overnight, or have three people in the same records from three devices. A browser file cannot do those things and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If you are a one to three person shop whose actual problem is forgotten follow-ups, you are paying $49 to $325 a month for a reminder list.
Why would a web design company give away a CRM?
Because we build websites service businesses own outright, the same way you own this file, and a tool that actually works is a better introduction than an ad. There is no email gate, no upsell inside the app, and no analytics on anything you type.
Where to go next
Built by PHIT Web
This CRM is a free tool from a company that builds websites service businesses own outright — the same way you own this file. If the pipeline is thin, the fix is upstream of any CRM. We will show you your homepage free, before you pay a dollar.
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