Yes.
You need to fix [you have no customers yet] before any tool will help.
Why
You said you're *launching* — there are no calls to record, no lifecycle to automate, no list to dial. Picking a "modern setup" now means you'll spend your first 90 days configuring workflows for hypothetical customers instead of selling policies. Insurance agencies that survive year one do it by writing 5-10 policies/month from a spreadsheet, not by pre-building Salesforce.
What you actually need
- Google Sheets (free) — one tab "Prospects 2026" with columns Date / Name / Phone / Line of Business / Quoted / Premium / Next Action / Status. Run your first 50 prospects through this. You'll learn what fields you actually need.
- Google Voice or a cheap VoIP line ($10-15/mo) — gives you a business number with native call recording and voicemail transcription. Pair with Otter.ai or Fathom free tier for call summaries. Total cost under $20/mo vs. $200+/mo for a full stack.
- A habit — end-of-day pipeline note — every evening, open the sheet, update "Next Action" for every prospect you spoke to. Five minutes. This is the lifecycle automation you think you need software for.
Do this today
Open Google Sheets, create a file called "Prospects 2026" with the eight columns above, and bookmark it in your browser bar. Then list every warm contact you plan to call in week one — friends, family, former colleagues, referrals — as rows. By tonight you have a real prospect list to work, not a software vendor demo to sit through.
What to ignore
Skip HubSpot Sales Hub Professional (~$100/seat/mo), Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, Close, and anything bundled as "AI-powered insurance CRM with native power dialer" — those are sold to agencies doing 200+ outbound dials/day, not pre-revenue founders. Power dialers specifically are useless until you have a list of 500+ qualified numbers to burn through; today you have zero. AgencyZoom, Radiusbob, and EZLynx pitches can wait until you've bound your first 25 policies.
What doing nothing costs you
You haven't named volume, premiums, or lines of business, so there's no slippage to compute. The real cost of over-tooling now is 2-3 weeks of setup time you should be spending on conversations with prospects.
When to revisit this
When you're writing 20+ policies/month and personally making 30+ outbound calls/day — then a real CRM with a dialer (look at Close or AgencyZoom) earns its price.