Here's a question worth asking before you put two years of relationships into any tool: if you stopped paying tomorrow, what would you actually get to keep?
For most CRMs the honest answer is "a CSV, if you remember to ask for one before the account locks." Your contacts, your notes, every call you logged — all of it sits in someone else's database, and the export button is the only door. That's not a scandal. It's just how the category is built, and it's the quiet reason switching costs feel so heavy.
We went the other way. Simple CRM for Gmail has no database of its own.
Where Everything Actually Lives
- Contacts → your Google Contacts. Not a copy, not a sync. The same contact you see at contacts.google.com. Edit it in either place; there's one record.
- Tasks → your Google Tasks. They show up in the Tasks panel in Gmail and Calendar and on your phone, because they are Google Tasks.
- Notes, activity, deals and custom tables → Google Sheets in your Drive. One folder, one spreadsheet per object. Ordinary sheets you can open, filter, chart, or hand to your accountant.
- Attachments → a folder in your Drive, holding the files you pulled off emails.
Open Drive right now and you could read your entire CRM without the add-on installed. That's the test we designed against.
Why This Beats an Export Button
An export is a snapshot of a thing you don't control. This is different in three ways that matter.
You can leave without a migration
Cancel and nothing moves, because nothing was ever anywhere else. Your contacts don't notice. Your tasks keep appearing in Gmail's task panel.
Your other tools already work
Anything that reads Google Sheets reads your pipeline — Looker Studio, Apps Script, Zapier, a formula in another sheet, a chart you build on a Sunday. You don't need us to ship an integration for the thing you want; the data is already in the most integrated format on earth.
Nothing rots in the gap
Sync-based tools keep a copy on each side and a bug in the middle. There's no copy here, so there's no drift.
Simple CRM for Gmail is almost here
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Is This Actually Secure?
This is the right question to ask any tool that plugs into your email, and the answer should be specific rather than reassuring.
Drive access is per-file, and you grant it one file at a time. We request the narrow drive.file scope, not full Drive access. That covers exactly two things: files the add-on created itself, and files you hand it by choosing them in Google's own file picker. When you attach something, you're browsing your whole Drive — but the add-on is only granted the file you actually pick. It can't list, search or open anything you haven't chosen, and you can revoke the whole thing from your Google account at any time.
Emails are read one at a time, while you have them open. The add-on runs when you open a message, sees that message, and pulls out the sender or recipients. There's no background crawl of your mailbox and no copy of your email kept anywhere.
Your CRM content isn't stored on our servers. Notes, deals, tasks and contacts go straight into your Google account. What we keep is small and boring: your settings, your custom field definitions, and your subscription status.
You can verify most of this yourself on the Google permissions screen at install time, which is where you should be reading it anyway.
The Trade-off, Honestly
This design costs us things, and you should know what they are.
Sheets are slower than a purpose-built database — with tens of thousands of records you'd feel it. We've split each object into its own spreadsheet so each gets the full cell budget, and it's fast for the small teams and solo operators this is built for. It is not built to be an enterprise CRM for a 200-person sales floor, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
You can also break it. It's your spreadsheet, so you can delete a column we need. We mark the core header row as protected with a warning, but we don't lock you out of your own file. We'd rather you have the keys and a warning sign than neither.
For most people that's the right trade: your data, in formats you already understand, in an account you already own.
What That Means for the Paid Part
Because the data is yours, the paywall can be honest about what it's charging for: the interface, not the hostages.
$15 a month or $149 a year, after a 14-day free trial with no credit card. When a trial ends, the add-on goes read-only — every contact, deal, note and task stays visible. You lose the ability to add and edit, not the ability to look. And even if you never subscribe, the spreadsheets are still sitting in your Drive.
That's not generosity, it's just what falls out of the design. When you don't hold someone's data, you have to earn the renewal on the product.
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