What's really going on

You're one person selling a high-trust service online. Families don't buy in a week — they circle for months, ask twice, then commit. What kills solo counselors isn't losing the lead. It's forgetting to follow up with the mom who said "let's reconnect after junior year starts." That's a memory problem, not a software problem.

What to do instead

1. Google Sheets (free) — one row per family: name, kid's grad year, last contact, next nudge date, source. Sort by next nudge date every Monday. That's your pipeline.
2. Airtable (free tier) — only if you want an intake form on your site that drops straight into the sheet-database, with a kanban view by stage (inquiry → discovery call → proposal → signed). Still free at your volume.
3. A Monday habit — 20 minutes, coffee in hand, sort by "next nudge date," send the three emails owed. That's the whole system.

Do this in 30 minutes: open a new Google Sheet, title it "Families 2026," and backfill every inquiry from the last 90 days with a next-nudge date in column E.

What you're being oversold

Someone will point you at HubSpot or Pipedrive because they're the names everyone knows. HubSpot Free is built for a team of five splitting inbound — you'll drown in features you don't need and get pushed to paid Sales Hub within a year. Pipedrive at ~$15/mo is fine software for a team of four reps; for you it's a $180/year tax on a spreadsheet problem. Doing nothing costs you the families who quietly went with someone else because you didn't circle back in October like you said you would — you won't see that number, but you'll feel it.

When to revisit this

When you're juggling more than 40 active families across multiple grad-year cohorts and the sheet stops fitting on one screen.

The part worth getting right

The one call is where the leads actually live. If most of your inquiries come through a form on your site and you want them to flow in without copy-paste, Airtable with its form view is the right shape — set it up once and forget it. If most come from referrals, DMs, and email replies, a plain sheet you type into on Monday morning wins, because no form catches those anyway. Pick wrong and you either spend a weekend building automation you don't need, or you build a form nobody uses while the referrals still pile up in your inbox unlogged.