Why I built VertaFlow instead of buying HubSpot

For about three years I ran my client pipeline the way most small studios do: a CRM I half-filled in, a scheduling tool that didn’t talk to it, a spreadsheet that was the real source of truth, and a tangle of Zapier automations holding the seams together. Every time a lead came in through the website, it had to hop across three or four services before it landed somewhere I’d actually look. Each hop was a place it could quietly fail.

It usually failed silently. A form submission that didn’t trigger the Zap. A duplicate contact because the scheduler created its own record. A follow-up that never fired because the automation hit a rate limit at 2am and I never got the error. None of these were catastrophic on their own. Together they meant I couldn’t trust the system, so I kept the spreadsheet, which meant I was doing double entry, which is the exact thing the software was supposed to prevent.

The breaking point wasn’t a price increase or a bad support call. It was realizing I was paying for several tools whose only real job, in my workflow, was to hold a name and an email and maybe a phone number — and then charging me again to move that data somewhere useful. I was renting storage for my own leads and paying a toll every time I wanted to act on them.

So I started writing down what a CRM actually had to do for a business like mine — a solo operator who hand-builds websites and needs the leads those sites generate to land somewhere accountable. The list was short:

• Capture a lead the moment it’s submitted, on infrastructure I control. No cross-service hop that can drop it. The website and the CRM should be the same system as far as a new lead is concerned.
• One record per person. If someone fills out the audit form and later books a call, that’s one contact, not two. Dedupe on email at write time, not in a nightly cleanup job.
• A pipeline I’ll actually keep current because updating it is faster than ignoring it — not a wall of fields I’ll abandon by week two.
• Invoicing and follow-up in the same place as the contact, so I’m not exporting a CSV to bill someone I already have on file.

That list became VertaFlow. It runs on the same stack I build client sites on — Cloudflare Workers at the edge, a Postgres database, the lead-capture endpoint living right next to the marketing site so a form submission is a database write, not a webhook relay race. When the free Lighthouse audit on this site runs, the lead it represents lands in the same system, deduped against anyone already there.

I’m not going to pretend VertaFlow does everything HubSpot does. It doesn’t, on purpose. It’s built for solo operators and small service businesses — the plumber, the landscaper, the one-person agency — not for an enterprise sales org with twelve seats and a RevOps team. The bet is that most small businesses are in the same spot I was: paying enterprise prices to use ten percent of an enterprise tool, and losing leads in the gaps between the tools they bolted on to fill what was missing.

If that sounds familiar, the free tools on this site are the same engine, opened up. Run the Lighthouse audit on your own site and you’ll see exactly how a lead flows in. And if you want the CRM itself, that’s what VertaFlow is — built by the person who got tired of the alternative, for people in the same boat.