// The situation

I am looking for a CRM platform to use for one of my clients. We previously used FreshSales but it was honestly too robust and complicated for our needs. Kozai Group has one primary product: assessments. They have 3 assessments which are purchased by organizations, classes/professors, or by individuals, but typically used in conjunction with an organization or class. We don't manage majority of our own sales, we go through a 3rd party for assessment dellivery and fullment. We do handle some of the larger enterprise sales manually. We don't really need to track the individuals who purchase assessments as they are often one off purchases, but would like to be tracking the larger purchases, which we would manually need to add the sales into the CRM like we would for our enterprise clients. With a CRM, I want to be able to easily see the sales, have some reminders about when clients typically order (so I can be sure to check in on them), as well as keep track of some client notes. We also need it to be free, which I know greatly limits our options. I also DO NOT want to use Hubspot. They are a heinous company

The verdict · Jun 23, 2026

Yes.

You need a simple CRM — but not a sales CRM.

What's really going on

Kozai sells three assessments, mostly through a third party. Your CRM job is tiny: maybe a few dozen enterprise and large-class buyers, manually entered, with notes and reorder reminders. That isn't a CRM problem — it's an account list with dates attached. Freshsales felt heavy because you were using a sales engine to babysit fifteen rows.

What to do instead

  1. Airtable or Notion (free) — one table: client, contact, assessment, last order date, typical reorder month, notes. Sort by reorder month. Done.
  2. Google Calendar (free) — recurring reminders on each client's typical reorder window. This is the "check in" feature you actually want, and no CRM does it better.
  3. Habit — every Friday, 15 minutes, open the table and update one column: last contact. That single column is what most CRMs are really selling.

First action, 30 minutes: open Airtable, "Start from scratch", name it Kozai Clients, add columns for Org, Contact, Assessment, Last Order, Typical Reorder Month, Notes. Paste in your current enterprise accounts from wherever they live now.

What you're being oversold

Pipedrive and the rest are pipeline tools — stages, deal values, forecasts. You don't have a pipeline; you have a reorder calendar. Paying $15/user/month to track ten accounts is the same mistake Freshsales was, in a cheaper coat. Doing nothing costs you the one thing you actually named: missing a client's reorder window because no one pinged you.

When to revisit this

When you're manually handling more than ~30 active enterprise accounts, or when two people need to see the same notes at the same time.

The part worth getting right

The fork is whether anyone else at Kozai needs to read or edit these notes. If it's just you, a single Airtable base with calendar reminders is the whole answer for years. If two or three people need shared ownership — sales, success, the founder — you want something with real multi-user permissions and an activity log from day one, because retrofitting that later means re-entering every account by hand. Which side of that line is Kozai actually on?

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