SMF·BIGIN
Can a prompt replace Bigin?
CRM & sales outreach — small-business pipeline CRM
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Bigin is a CRM that has been on a diet, and the diet is the product. Rebuilding the software takes a weekend — records, a few pipelines, activities, a today screen. What you cannot rebuild in a weekend is the part people actually touch most: the iOS and Android apps, which are genuinely good and are where a field salesperson lives. Nothing here is a data or network moat, so this is a real substitute with a real hole in it.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a small-business CRM that refuses to grow. The constraint is the feature.
Stack: any server-rendered framework you like with Postgres or SQLite, one command to start.
Hard rules the code must enforce, not just document:
- A record type may have at most eight custom fields. The "add field" button disables at eight and says why.
- At most three pipelines exist. Creating a fourth is blocked.
- A pipeline has at most seven stages.
Entities: Contact, Company, Deal, Activity. A Deal belongs to one pipeline and one stage, has an amount, a close date, and one linked Contact. An Activity is a call, a meeting or a task with a due date and an outcome note.
The home screen is a single "Today" list, in this order: activities overdue, activities due today, deals whose close date has passed while still open. Nothing else on that screen. No charts.
The pipeline screen is a drag-and-drop board with the stage totals in the header, and moving a card between stages writes an entry in that deal's history with the old stage, the new stage, and the time.
Build it mobile-first: the board and the Today list must be usable one-handed at 390px wide before you style anything for desktop. Add a web app manifest so it installs to a phone home screen and the today list is cached read-only when offline.
Include CSV import and export for contacts, companies and deals, and a nightly database dump to a local folder with a documented restore command.
Write tests for the three hard limits above and for the stage-history writes.
Do not add telephony, email sync, marketing campaigns, or a second dashboard. If a feature request arrives, the answer this codebase gives is no.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 the iOS and Android apps, including offline access on the road
- B.2 built-in telephony and the call log that comes with it
- B.3 one-click connection to the rest of Zoho (Books, Desk, Campaigns)
- B.4 email sync, so mail gets logged only when you paste it
- B.5 push notifications for an activity falling due
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: mobile apps and Zoho ecosystem
Nine dollars a month buys a CRM that is already on the phone in your pocket, already backed up, and already wired into the invoicing tool you may adopt next year. For a two-person business that is a rational trade against a weekend of building and a lifetime of maintaining.
Questions
Why cap fields and pipelines in code instead of just being disciplined?
Because the failure mode of a self-built CRM is not that it lacks features, it is that it grows into an unusable spreadsheet within a year. Bigin sells restraint; a rebuild that abandons the restraint is not the same product.
Can I still use it on my phone without native apps?
Yes, as an installed web app: the today list and the pipeline board are built mobile-first and the manifest lets it live on the home screen. What you do not get is offline editing, background sync, or a push notification when an activity falls due.
How do calls get logged without telephony?
Manually, from the record: tap the number, place the call in your phone dialler, then fill the outcome note that the activity form opens with. Bigin's built-in dialler does that in one motion and this does it in two.
What happens when I outgrow three pipelines?
You have outgrown this build, and honestly you have outgrown Bigin Express too — that is the tier boundary Zoho sells you upward from. Export the CSVs and move to something with a real schema, like the flexible-object approach in the Attio entry.
Related tools
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