Free CRM for insurance agents: what 'free' actually costs you

Search it and you'll find spreadsheets, free tiers of general CRMs, and a few insurance tools with a free plan. Some agents run on them for years. Here's what free costs, so you can decide with your eyes open.

The spreadsheet. Costs nothing and works until you have two hundred leads and a callback you forgot. The real cost is the callback you forgot.

Free tiers of general CRMs. Contacts and notes, usually a cap on records, no dialer, no texting. You'll dial from your cell and text from your cell, which means your personal number is now your business number, and nothing you send is registered. That's fine for a handful of referrals. It's a compliance problem at volume.

Free insurance-specific plans. Read what's excluded. Usually the dialer, the texting or the seats. The free plan exists to get you to the paid one, which is fair, as long as you know the paid number before you build your day around the free one.

What paid buys you. The dialer that keeps your numbers clean, the registered texting, the record that carries the household and the policy, and the export when you leave. For an agent doing fifty dials a day, the paid tool pays for itself the first week it saves one policy from lapsing on a missed draft.

The honest rule. Free until you're dialing every day. Paid the week you are. We'd say that even if we didn't sell one.