Does a ten-person company need to pay for a CRM at all?
Summary
Often not at first. If one to three people keep the CRM updated and your records number in the low thousands, Zoho CRM's free plan (three users, 5,000 records) or the two-user free plans from HubSpot and Salesforce can carry you. Once you do pay, you pay for the people who work in the CRM every day, not for headcount, and three seats run from $252 a year on Bigin Express to $900 a year on Salesforce Starter Suite.
Free plans and where they stop
- Zoho CRM: three users, 5,000 records across all modules (10 MB), 1 GB of file storage, imports of 1,000 records per batch, and up to 10 exports a day.
- Bigin by Zoho: Zoho's smaller CRM. The free plan allows one user and 500 records.
- HubSpot: the free tools cover up to two users.
- Salesforce: the Free CRM Suite covers up to two users.
Zoho's cap counts contacts, companies, deals, and every other module together, so it fills faster than a contact list alone would suggest. Bigin's paid tiers raise the ceiling to 50,000 records on Express and 100,000 on Premier.
Paying for three seats, not ten
Take a ten-person company where three salespeople update the CRM daily and the other seven only check on accounts now and then.
| Plan | Price used | Three seats for a year |
|---|---|---|
| Bigin Express | $7 per user per month, billed yearly | $252 (no user cap on paid plans) |
| Pipedrive Lite | $168 per seat per year, billed annually | $504 (prepaid, not refundable) |
| Salesforce Starter Suite | $25 per user per month, billed monthly or annually | $900 (no user maximum) |
What happens to the other seven depends on the product. HubSpot's Starter, Professional, and Enterprise subscriptions include View-Only seats at no charge and in unlimited numbers. Those users can view records, dashboards, and reports and filter reports, but they can't edit records, save reports, or log emails.
Moving from free to paid
When a HubSpot account upgrades from the free tools to Starter, the free seats are removed and every user gets a seat under the paid subscription. Zoho CRM's paid plans can be billed monthly or yearly, with a lower per-user price on the yearly option. The monthly-versus-annual guide lists that gap product by product.
Sources
- https://www.zoho.com/crm/zohocrm-pricing.html
- https://www.zoho.com/crm/free-crm.html
- https://www.zoho.com/crm/complete-feature-list.html
- https://www.bigin.com/pricing.html
- https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/sales
- https://knowledge.hubspot.com/account-management/manage-seats
- https://www.salesforce.com/small-business/crm-suites/
- https://www.salesforce.com/small-business/pricing/
- https://www.pipedrive.com/en/pricing
- https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/what-is-the-difference-between-annual-and-monthly-billing-in-pipedrive
Related on this site
- How far can a free CRM plan take you before it gets in the way?
- Seat cost calculator
- How do Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive and four other well-known CRMs differ, and what does each cost to start?
- Monthly versus annual billing: the gap is 1.00 to 2.86 times
- How do I move customer data from a spreadsheet or an old CRM into a new CRM?
Written by Kaz (pen name). Published September 27, 2026. The figures above come from the vendor and review-site pages listed under Sources. We have not used these products. Corrections: contact form.