Built for teams that want to try a CRM without a countdown timer
A free trial CRM that does not end on day 15.
Most CRM free trials are 14 days with a credit card captured on signup, which quietly auto-charges on day 15. The team sets up pipelines, imports contacts, invites a few users, and then faces the choice: pay $45 to $150 per seat per month or lose everything they built. Strkr's Starter plan is a free CRM with no credit card and no clock. Keep it, grow on it, upgrade when it earns the upgrade.
Teams searching for a free trial CRM are usually in the evaluation phase: they want to try a system with their own data, with their own team, in their own workflow, before committing a monthly budget. The common free-trial pattern (14 days, credit card captured, auto-charge on day 15) breaks that evaluation in specific ways. The pain points below are the places the trial pattern fails the team doing the evaluation.
The 14-day clock is too short
Real evaluation takes 4 to 8 weeks.
A CRM evaluation runs across weekly sales meetings, pipeline reviews, a few real deals, and some data imports. The team needs 4 to 8 weeks to see whether the tool fits the motion. A 14-day trial forces either a rushed decision or a trial reset that strands setup work. Strkr's free Starter plan has no clock, so the evaluation runs on the team's pace.
The credit card capture
Trial signup requires card details that auto-charge on day 15.
Most CRM trials capture a credit card at signup to continue after the trial, then auto-charge $45 to $150 per seat on day 15. Teams that forgot to cancel face a surprise charge and a cancellation support ticket. Strkr's Starter plan requires no credit card at signup; the upgrade to Standard is an explicit action, not a default.
Loss of work on trial expiry
The team set up pipelines, now they are gone.
When a CRM trial ends and the team declines to pay, the work set up during the trial (pipelines, contacts, deals, custom fields) typically becomes read-only or disappears. The evaluation effort was wasted. Strkr's free plan keeps everything the team builds; declining to upgrade to Standard preserves the Starter workspace indefinitely.
The sales call during trial
The AE emails every 3 days to pressure a decision.
Vendor sales teams run outbound against trial accounts aggressively, with daily or near-daily emails from day 3 onward. The team evaluating cannot focus on the evaluation because they are managing the sales pressure. Strkr's free Starter is self-serve; no AE is assigned on signup, no outbound campaign runs against free users.
Feature gating during trial
The trial unlocks everything, then locks it on day 15.
Trials often unlock the full feature set for 14 days to showcase the premium capabilities, then revert to a stripped free tier (or no access at all) on day 15. The team evaluated features they will not have on the plan they can afford. Strkr's Starter plan features are the Starter features; the trial of Standard features (if the team wants to try them) is a separate explicit motion rather than a bait-and-switch.
No path for a bootstrapped team
The free tier is too stripped to be real.
Some vendors ship a free tier alongside the trial that is so stripped down (3 users, 100 contacts, no reports, no automation) that it is unusable for anything beyond demonstration. The team pays or walks. Strkr's Starter plan is a working CRM with contacts, deals, tasks, activity timeline, forms, basic reporting, email integration, and up to 2 users; the limits are intentional starting points for a bootstrapped team, not sabotage.
What ships on the free Starter plan
A real CRM, not a trial that becomes nothing on day 15.
The Strkr Starter plan replaces the typical 14-day trial pattern with a plan that keeps running. The capabilities below are what ships at zero cost on day 1 and day 100.
Contacts and companies
Full CRM records with timeline, notes, tasks.
Up to 1,000 contact records on the Starter plan, each with full timeline (email, form submissions, call logs, notes), custom fields, tags, and tasks. Company records associate contacts with the organizations they belong to. The pattern replaces a spreadsheet or an inbox-based list with a structured CRM.
Deal pipeline
Kanban-style deal board with stages and amounts.
Deals move across a kanban-style pipeline with configurable stages (Qualified, Discovery, Proposal, Negotiation, Closed Won, Closed Lost). Each deal carries amount, expected close date, owner, and associated contacts. The board gives the team a shared view of what is in play without a paid upgrade.
Tasks and activity
Shared task list with reminders and due dates.
Tasks on contacts, companies, and deals with due dates, reminders, and ownership. The task list shows what is due today, overdue, and upcoming. Email notifications and optional mobile push on due date. The pattern replaces the I meant to follow up failure that costs small-team inbound revenue.
Email integration
Gmail or Microsoft 365 two-way sync.
Connect Gmail or Microsoft 365 for two-way email sync. Sent and received email with CRM contacts lands on the contact timeline automatically. BCC-to-CRM works for teams on other email systems. The pattern eliminates the manual-log-email failure that defines CRM adoption on free tiers of larger systems.
Forms with CRM behind them
Embeddable contact forms that create records on submit.
The form builder lives on the Starter plan with the one-line embed, honeypot plus rate-limit spam defense, UTM capture, and routing. Submissions become CRM contacts with an assigned owner and an email notification. The form-plus-CRM pattern replaces widget forms and inbox-only submissions.
Basic reporting
Pipeline total, deal velocity, activity volume.
Basic reports on the Starter plan: pipeline total by stage, deal velocity (average days per stage), activity volume by user, contact and deal growth over time. The reports are enough for a small team to see the shape of their motion without a paid upgrade.
Mobile access
iOS and Android apps included.
The Strkr mobile apps for iOS and Android include contacts, deals, tasks, and push notifications. The mobile experience is the same workspace as the web, so a seller on the road sees the same data as the ops person at a desk. Mobile is a free-plan capability, not a paid upgrade.
Full export
CSV plus JSON export on the free plan.
The admin can export all contact, company, deal, and activity data at any time from the admin UI. The export is self-serve and lives on Starter the same as on paid tiers. Data portability stays open at every tier so the vendor-customer relationship remains honest.
Grow without migrating
Starter to Standard is a plan change, not a project.
When the team needs more users, custom field types, cadences, scoring, or SMS, Starter upgrades to Standard with the data staying in place. The common failure of we outgrew our free tool and now we have a migration disappears structurally because the free tool is the same system as the paid tool.
Where free trial CRMs break and Starter does not
Six specific places the free-plan path beats the trial path.
The 14-day trial pattern has specific failure modes. The sections below are where Strkr's free Starter plan was deliberately designed differently.
No countdown
Evaluation runs on the team's pace.
The team evaluates for 2 weeks or 2 months as the motion demands. No trial-reset tactics, no please extend my trial support tickets, no artificial deadline that forces a decision before the team has the data.
No card capture
Signup requires an email, not a credit card.
The team evaluates without exposing a credit card to automatic charging. The upgrade to Standard is an explicit action; the free plan continues indefinitely if the team never upgrades.
Work persists
Pipelines, contacts, deals stay forever.
Everything the team sets up on Starter persists. If the team adopts Starter long-term, the work accumulates. If the team later upgrades, the historical data stays in place.
No AE outbound
Starter signup does not trigger a sales campaign.
Strkr runs self-serve on the free plan; there is no AE assigned on signup, no 3-day outbound cadence, no when can we schedule the demo pressure. The team evaluates in peace.
No bait-and-switch
Starter features are permanent Starter features.
The free plan does not pretend to be the paid plan during a trial window. The team sees the actual Starter capability set from day 1 and makes the upgrade decision on that information.
Real plan for bootstrapped teams
Starter is a working CRM, not a demo tier.
Starter is designed to be the right plan for small bootstrapped teams for as long as the team is small. 1,000 contacts, 2 users, native forms, email sync, mobile apps, basic reporting. The team runs the business on it until growth earns the Standard upgrade.
What happens if you need Standard capabilities
The Standard tier for teams that outgrow Starter.
Starter is designed to serve a 1 to 2 person team on up to 1,000 contacts. Teams that grow past that scale upgrade to Standard. The capabilities below are what Standard adds without replacing Starter.
More users and contacts
Unlimited users at per-seat pricing, higher contact ceiling.
Standard supports unlimited users at the per-seat price and lifts the contact ceiling to a higher threshold. The team that outgrew the 2-user Starter limit does not have to pick between keeping users and keeping their data; the upgrade preserves everything.
Custom fields with advanced types
Currency, lookup, calculated, formula.
Custom field types expand to include currency, lookup references across records, calculated fields with formula support, and multi-select with controlled vocabularies. The pattern replaces workarounds (text fields holding dollar amounts, free-text categorical fields) with structured data.
Cadences
Multi-step outreach sequences with triggers.
Cadences automate multi-step outreach (day 1 email, day 3 call task, day 5 LinkedIn message, day 10 breakup email). Triggers advance contacts through steps based on behavior (opened, replied, booked). The pattern replaces the manual remember to follow up on day 3 cognitive load.
Lead scoring
Score contacts on behavior and firmographic signals.
Lead scoring assigns numeric scores to contacts based on configurable rules (visited pricing page, opened 3 emails, title contains Director). High-scoring contacts surface in a priority view. The pattern replaces the manual-triage-of-every-new-contact failure that defines growing inbound.
Strkr Messaging (SMS plus MMS)
Tier-1 carrier messaging with CRM integration.
Strkr Messaging ships SMS and MMS through tier-1 carrier infrastructure with 10DLC registration, A2P compliance, STOP keyword handling, and timeline logging on the contact. Pricing is $0.02 per SMS and $0.05 per MMS plus a $29 monthly base; carrier fees pass through at cost.
Open API with webhooks
Integrations without a per-integration bill.
Standard includes the full open API with authenticated REST endpoints, webhook subscriptions, and documentation. Teams integrate with their existing stack (billing, accounting, data warehouse) without per-integration add-on fees. The pattern replaces the every integration is a line-item upcharge model that defines larger CRM vendors.
Head-to-head
Strkr free Starter vs the common 14-day trial CRMs.
The 14-day trial pattern is nearly universal among mid-market CRM vendors. The comparison below is honest about what the trial gets and what Starter gets.
Feature
Strkr
HubSpot / Salesforce / Pipedrive 14-day trials
Time limit
No clock on Starter
14 days typical, 30 on some
Credit card at signup
Not required
Required typically
Auto-charge default
None
Yes, on trial end
Data retention after trial
Permanent on Starter
Read-only or deleted
User cap
2 users on Starter
5-10 during trial typical
Contact cap
1,000 contacts on Starter
Varies by vendor
Email sync
Included on Starter
Included during trial, often paid after
Mobile app access
Full access on Starter
Full during trial, varies after
Export at end of trial
Not relevant, no trial end
Varies, sometimes gated
AE outbound after signup
None, self-serve
3-7 day cadence typical
How teams use Strkr
How teams evaluate Strkr on the free plan today.
The playbooks below are patterns teams run when evaluating Strkr on Starter rather than on a 14-day trial elsewhere.
Early-stage startup, 2 founders
Ran Starter for 11 months before upgrading.
A two-founder pre-seed startup signed up for Strkr Starter on the recommendation of an advisor. The team used Starter as their working CRM for 11 months, building up roughly 480 contacts and 85 deals. When the team hired a third person who needed CRM access, they upgraded to Standard. The founders reported that having 11 months of evaluation on real data (versus a 14-day trial on test data) made the upgrade decision obvious rather than a leap of faith.
Boutique agency, 4 people
Migrated off HubSpot Free to Strkr Starter.
A 4-person brand agency hit the 100-contact cap on HubSpot Free during a busy Q3 and faced a $45 per seat per month upgrade quote. The team evaluated Strkr Starter during a weekend and migrated the following Monday. The 1,000-contact ceiling plus 2-user cap worked for the agency's 2 primary CRM users (the founder and the senior account director); the other 2 team members used read-only reporting through shared dashboards. Monthly savings compared to the HubSpot upgrade ran roughly $180.
Freelance consultant
Replaced spreadsheet CRM with Starter in an afternoon.
A freelance consultant had been running a Google Sheet as a CRM for 18 months, with roughly 240 contacts and growing frustration about losing timeline context. Starter signup took 3 minutes; CSV import took 20 minutes; manual cleanup of the imported contacts took an afternoon. The consultant has been on Starter for 7 months without approaching the contact limit; the upgrade conversation will happen when the practice grows past 1,000 active contacts.
Services firm evaluating alternatives to Salesforce
Ran Starter in parallel with Salesforce for 90 days.
A 35-person services firm paying $150 per seat per month for Salesforce evaluated alternatives. The firm set up Strkr Starter for 2 users (the sales ops lead and the sales director) and ran parallel entry for 90 days: every deal went into both systems. At the 90-day mark, the team compared the two: reporting parity, pipeline visibility, mobile experience. The firm migrated to Standard on day 95. The parallel evaluation was only possible because Starter had no clock; a 14-day Strkr trial would not have produced the same confidence.
Nonprofit organization
Used Starter for the full year, avoided the HubSpot cap.
A small environmental nonprofit used Strkr Starter for annual donor-engagement workflows. The nonprofit's Q4 campaign produced roughly 420 inquiries, which would have triggered HubSpot Free's 100-contact cap and forced a paid upgrade mid-campaign. On Starter, submissions continued without a cap; the campaign ran without an upgrade surprise. The nonprofit upgraded to Standard the following year when a second staff member joined the CRM workflow, with no data migration between plans.
A free CRM that does not become nothing on day 15.
Start on Strkr Starter without a credit card. Build your pipeline, import your contacts, invite your co-founder. Keep running on Starter or upgrade to Standard when the team earns the upgrade.
Is Strkr Starter actually a free CRM, or is it a limited trial with a different name?
Starter is a free plan with no time limit. It is not a renamed trial. Signup requires an email and a workspace name; no credit card is captured. The plan continues indefinitely at zero cost; the team upgrades to Standard only when they choose to. Starter includes: up to 1,000 contact records, up to 2 users, full CRM functionality (contacts, companies, deals, tasks, activity timeline), email integration (Gmail or Microsoft 365), native contact forms with embed, basic reporting, mobile apps for iOS and Android, full data export. The limits are intentional starting points for a bootstrapped team, not placeholders for a hidden expiration.
What happens when I hit the 1,000-contact or 2-user limit on Starter?
The admin receives notifications as the workspace approaches the limits. For contacts, notifications fire at 800 and 1,000. New submissions above 1,000 continue creating records; Strkr does not lock the forms or the CRM at the limit. For users, the second user is included on Starter; the third user signup prompts an upgrade conversation. The pattern is deliberately different from the HubSpot Free hard-lock-at-cap approach because surprise locks damage the evaluation experience. Sustained usage above the limits prompts a Standard upgrade conversation; occasional short-term overage is tolerated as a soft limit.
Can I upgrade from Starter to Standard without losing data?
Yes. The upgrade is a plan change on the admin UI, not a migration. All contact records, companies, deals, custom fields, notes, tasks, activity timeline, forms, and integrations stay in place. The new Standard capabilities (unlimited users, cadences, lead scoring, Strkr Messaging, custom field types, open API, SSO) activate on upgrade. Historical data from the Starter period remains fully accessible with the same structure. The pricing changes to the per-seat Standard rate. The upgrade happens on a Wednesday and the business runs as normal on Thursday.
What if I want to try Standard features; can I preview them before upgrading?
Yes. The admin UI surfaces Standard features in-context with a preview this feature option that lets the user test the capability on their actual Starter data for a short window. The preview is explicit (the admin opts into each feature preview individually) rather than a bait-and-switch where everything unlocks for a trial window and then locks on day 15. Teams typically preview the features that match their current motion (cadences for growing outbound, lead scoring for growing inbound, Strkr Messaging for SMS-ready audiences) rather than previewing the full set. The preview helps the team decide whether the upgrade earns its price for their specific use case.
Will Strkr sales reach out when I sign up for the free plan?
No. Starter is self-serve; signup does not trigger an AE outbound cadence. The team evaluates on their own time without the when can we schedule a demo email cadence that defines most CRM trial signups. For teams that want proactive help (data migration from another CRM, workflow setup, custom field design), those services are available on the paid Standard and Enterprise tiers. The pattern is help when asked rather than pressure by default. The Starter workspace stays private to the team; no sales motion runs against free accounts.
How does Strkr handle data privacy and compliance on the free plan?
The Starter plan runs on the same infrastructure as paid plans with the same security posture. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Access control uses role-based permissions. The platform is HIPAA compliant with a BAA available on paid tiers for teams in regulated contexts. The SOC 2 Type II program is in progress through 2026-Q4. GDPR and CCPA posture includes data access, portability, and deletion requests through the admin UI. The free plan does not get a lesser security posture; the compliance paperwork (BAA, DPA) sits on paid plans because those teams typically need the paper trail for procurement.
No sales call, no migration consultant, no four-month implementation. Enter your card, get 14 days of the full Pro tier, cancel any time before day 14 with zero charge. Spin up a workspace, import your CSV, and have something useful before lunch.
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