What's really going on

At under 10 leads a month, your real risk isn't tracking — it's slow replies and forgotten follow-ups. Every lead comes through email or your web form, so your inbox already is your pipeline. The job is to make sure nothing sits there for three days while you're heads-down in code. One missed reply at your deal size hurts more than any "lost lead report" would help.

What to do instead

1. Airtable (free tier) — one base with columns for name, source, last contact, next step. Pipe the web form straight into it.
2. Make (free tier) — one scenario: new form submission → row in Airtable → reminder email to yourself in 3 days if no reply logged.
3. Habit — every Friday, 15 minutes, open the base and nudge anyone older than a week.

First action, doable now: in your web form tool, copy the webhook URL, paste it into a new Make scenario, connect it to a fresh Airtable base with five columns. Done before lunch.

What you're being oversold

HubSpot Free will be pitched to you as "free forever" — it is, until a sales rep calls about Sales Hub, and the interface is built for a team of ten, not one. Folk is lovely but you don't need per-seat software to track eight emails. The cost of doing nothing here isn't measured in lost deals — it's measured in the one consulting inquiry per quarter that goes cold because you were shipping code and forgot to reply for a week.

When to revisit this

When you start subcontracting work to another developer and need them to see who's talking to whom.

The part worth getting right

The real fork is whether your inquiries are mostly one-shot project leads or the start of long relationships you nurture for months. If it's one-shot — a 3-day reminder and a Friday sweep is the whole system, forever. If it's nurture — you need light notes on each contact, last-touched dates, and a "warm again in 90 days" trigger, and Airtable alone won't cut it without some structure around it. Same tool, different shape. Get this wrong and in six months you're either over-engineering nothing or losing a €15k retainer because you forgot a name.