About Hermit CRM
Written by Gijs Bos, .
This is the short story about why and how I created Hermit CRM. I had decided in August or September 2026 to start doing interim/fractional work. I already had a client, but I could take on another one. So I started looking for one. Quite quickly I realised that I needed a way to track my outreach efforts. I vividly remember how I took a Google Sheet and created two tabs. One with companies and the other one with contacts. But before even finishing those two tabs, I thought: "What the hell am I doing? This is exactly what I advise my customers not to do: an unstructured way of executing sales processes."
I looked at HubSpot, Attio, and a bunch of others, but their free versions didn't do what I wanted. And thus Hermit CRM was conceived. It started out with a list of simple functionalities: companies, contacts and tasks. That was done quickly. A functionality for importing a CSV with leads from Clay.com came next. I quickly realised that I didn't need a web-based app, because it was just me. And by the time I'd need another person, my readiness to invest in an expensive CRM might be higher.
Once I took the local storage / sovereign route, it was easy to decide to use a list of .md files as storage. Honestly, without really thinking it through, the CRM was fully AI-enabled. And not the kind of AI that the big firms give you, but something I (and therefore anybody) could change instantly with a couple of simple commands with their own AI tool of choice.
Truth be told, for about 5 minutes I thought: I could sell Hermit CRM and become the new Marc Benioff. Quickly, I realised that I'd be happier as an indie vibe coder. So, I open sourced the code under an Apache license.
The functionalities that came afterwards were just for fun and personal frustrations with how the Hermit worked for me. I kept thinking: "If I improve it for myself, why not share it with the rest of the planet?" My rationale: if just one person finds it useful for a couple of weeks, that's more than enough.
Anyway, now (beginning of October 2026) I'm looking for beta testers: friends, family, random strangers on the interwebs. I'm somewhat hesitant to put it out there. There are many great open source CRMs such as Twenty and others, but few use local storage, are easy to use and are completely free.
If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.
By typing this I suppose I'm ready. What I'd really like is for others to become Hermits as well: to use it, to modify it to suit their workflows or even to expand the main version together with me.
Please share what you (dis)like. All your feedback will be read and answered by me: feedback@hermitcrm.io