Why I built Groundbase as a solo dev (and why that's the point)

Groundbase is built by one person. No co-founder, no funding round, no sales or marketing department, no support tier. I build it, ship it, fix it and answer the email.

That is deliberate. This post is why, what it means if you sign up, and the risk it carries, because the risk is real and you should weigh it.

Why solo

The reasons, roughly in order of how much they mattered.

I wanted a CRM I'd actually use

The CRM I needed didn't exist. The ones that did were priced per seat for a team I don't have, built around routing deals between salespeople, or the entry plan of a bigger suite that wanted me to upgrade. So I built the one I would use, and I use it every day for my own business.

Building it alone was the only way to keep it that shape. A co-founder, an investor or a team brings opinions about what should exist. Sometimes those opinions improve a product. Often they pull it towards the average of everyone's preferences, away from the specific thing one person needed. Solo, the product gets to stay specific: a CRM for a business of one.

No investor pressure

Venture-backed software follows a script. Hit the growth target, raise the next round, hire, widen the product, exit. Every decision gets filtered through the next milestone. That suits some founders. It isn't what I want.

Without that pressure I can refuse features, like social media scheduling, that would look good in a pitch deck and do little for the people using it. And I can keep one plan instead of designing tiers whose job is to push people up them.

The economics of a small product work

Groundbase is $19 a month, or $199 a year. At $19, 200 customers is $3,800 a month. 500 is $9,500. None of those numbers is large. For one person with no team, no office and no investors expecting a return, they are a sustainable business.

That is the shape Groundbase is trying to be. It doesn't need a billion-dollar exit. It needs a few hundred people who find it useful enough to stay.

You deal with the person who built it

When you email Groundbase support, you email me. Not a ticket queue, not a chatbot, not someone reading from a script. The person who built the screen you're confused about is the person who replies.

When you report a bug, the person reading it knows the code. When you ask for a feature, the person deciding is the one you're talking to. There's no roadmap committee in between.

The price, stated honestly

The first version of this post, in April, said I could charge $9 a month forever. On 1 October the price became $19 a month, or $199 a year. I shouldn't have written "forever" about a price, and I've taken it out.

What hasn't changed is how the price works. There is one plan. Every feature in the app is in it: contacts, deals and tasks, your own mailbox inside the CRM, texting and calling, campaigns and newsletters, workflows, booking links, invoicing and quotes, documents and e-signatures, and the AI connection. No Starter or Pro tier, no seats, no caps on contacts or deals, nothing waiting behind an upgrade.

Some things cost money that isn't mine to include. Texts and calls go through your own Twilio account, which bills you directly: about a US$20 first top-up, a couple of dollars a month for a number, and a cent or two per text. Campaign email goes through your own Resend account, free to start and US$20 a month for 50,000 emails. Card payments go through your own Stripe. I take no cut of any of them.

What this means in practice

It moves at one person's pace. A company with fifty engineers ships faster than I do. What you get instead is a product where each feature is the shape I meant, not a compromise between departments.

Support is direct, but it has hours. Replies normally go out within a few hours during US Eastern business hours, and take longer overnight and at weekends. I read everything. I also sleep, and some weeks I'm deep in a release.

The roadmap is opinionated. No social scheduling, no CMS, no ad platform integrations. Groundbase does the CRM job and connects to the rest of your tools through webhooks and the AI assistant you already use. If you want one vendor for everything, a suite like HubSpot or Zoho is the better fit.

There is no team. No sales calls, no account manager, no shared logins. Groundbase is one user per account, because it's built for a business of one.

The bus-factor risk

If something happened to me, the servers would keep running for a while. Groundbase runs on Cloudflare Workers, Turso and Stripe, which don't need someone at a desk to stay up. But nobody would be fixing bugs, answering email or shipping the next change. There is no second pair of hands.

That's worth knowing if you're choosing a CRM for something critical. The mitigation I can offer is that your data is never locked in. Settings → Backup & export gives you everything in one file whenever you want it, and your phone numbers live in your own Twilio account, not mine.

Why this shape of company is more common now

Solo software in 2026 looks different from solo software in 2018. The tools got better. One person can now:

• Run infrastructure that used to need an operations team, on platforms like Cloudflare Workers and Turso.
• Take payments in several currencies without a finance team, through Stripe.
• Send email at scale without a deliverability engineer, through a provider like Resend.
• Connect to AI assistants through MCP, so customers' own assistants can work inside the product without an integration per service.

What used to take a ten-person company can now be one person and a coherent stack. That's how Groundbase can be three apps built by one person, and it's also why that one person is the limiting factor.

What you get

If you sign up for Groundbase, you get:

• A CRM built by someone who uses it daily for his own business.
• Support from the person who built it.
• A roadmap aimed at one-person businesses, not enterprise sales teams.
• One plan with every feature in it, no tiers and no seats.
• Bugs fixed by the person who knows the code.
• The bus-factor risk of a one-person company.

If you sign up for HubSpot, you get a large company behind the product, with the tiers and seats that come with it. That's a different trade-off, and for some people the right one. Who Groundbase is and isn't for is the straight version of who should pick which.

Groundbase is the one-person version. That's the point of it, and also its main limit.

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Questions about this one? Email me directly: blog-solo@groundbasecrm.com — I read every one.