Built for trades, services, and solo operators who are tired of paying per seat for tools designed for enterprise sales teams of 50. Flat rate per organisation, every feature included from day one. $49/mo for the first 5 users, $99/mo for unlimited.
If you have never used one, the term sounds like enterprise jargon. It is not. Here is the honest version.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. In practice it is one place where every lead, customer, quote, follow-up, and invoice lives. Instead of a phone full of half-typed names, a notebook in the ute, three Gmail threads, and a paper job sheet, everything sits in one searchable list.
If you have ever asked yourself "did I get back to that bloke who rang last Tuesday?" — that is the problem a CRM solves.
You probably need a CRM if any of these are true:
You probably do not need one yet if you handle fewer than two enquiries a month and one notebook covers it.
The big-name CRMs (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive) were built for sales teams of 20 to 200 people inside companies with marketing departments. They charge per user per month, every feature is gated behind a higher tier, and the setup takes a consultant.
For a tradie or service business with 1 to 10 people, that math is broken. You pay $25 to $90 per person per month for software you use 10 percent of, with the features you actually need locked behind the next price tier.
Big Bear CRM exists because that pricing model makes no sense for a small Australian business. Flat rate per organisation, every feature included, built around the workflow a service business actually has. See the comparison below for the numbers.
Every feature below ships inside Big Bear CRM. Not a roadmap. Not a wishlist. Built, tested, and running.
Find local businesses by industry and suburb. Scrape their website for owner-direct mobile and email. Run an ABN check. Build a pre-call brief with business age, tech stack, and outreach tips. Optional AI brief for deeper insight.
One button creates a contact, a deal, and a company in a single transaction. Drops it straight into your pipeline at the first stage. Skip the form-filling.
Att 1, Att 2, Att 3, Appointment Booked, Discovery Call, Proposal Sent, Project Won, Completed, Lost. Multi-pipeline with favourites, drag-and-drop, and automated reminders.
Send a clean web quote with one-click accept. Status auto-flips when the customer views and accepts. Skip the PDF round-trip.
Embed a snippet on any client website. Form submissions arrive as Contacts and Deals automatically.
Bring existing data in, delete or export many rows at once. No more Excel exports for compliance.
New organisations can sign up themselves. Multi-tenant with strict isolation. Run an agency mini-CRM for clients.
I built Big Bear because I watched small-business mates pay $25 per user, per month, for tools built for enterprise sales teams of fifty. A 4-person plumbing business pays $100 a month with the big players before they log a single lead. Big Bear is $49 flat for the whole organisation. Add your PA, your apprentice, your bookkeeper. Same price. Same features the big players charge for, none of the bloat, half the cost or less.
| Feature | Big Bear CRM | Big Player A | Big Player B | Big Player C |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price (AUD, monthly) | $49 flat first 5 users included Growth unlimited |
$24 per user |
$21 per user |
$19 per user |
| Cost for a 4-person team (per month) | $49 | $96 | $84 | $76 |
| Lead generator built-in | ✅ included | ❌ third-party add-on | ❌ third-party add-on | ❌ third-party add-on |
| AI-powered pre-call briefs | ✅ included | ⚠️ paid add-on | ❌ | ❌ |
| Public web quotes with one-click accept | ✅ | ⚠️ template add-on | ⚠️ template add-on | ⚠️ template add-on |
| Embeddable contact forms | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| CSV import and bulk export | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Self-host / data ownership option | ✅ ($15k pro install) | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Setup time | hours | days to weeks | days to weeks | days to weeks |
| AU-specific (ABN, AUD, Aussie English) | ✅ | ⚠️ adapted | ⚠️ adapted | ⚠️ adapted |
| Hand-built for small business | ✅ | ❌ enterprise-leaning | ⚠️ mid-market focus | ⚠️ mid-market focus |
Comparing against generic big-player pricing. For a detailed HubSpot comparison with exact current pricing, see Big Bear CRM vs HubSpot.
Industry-specific guides: electricians, plumbers, builders, cleaners.
No per-seat trap. Add your PA, your apprentice, your whole team. The price doesn't change.
Best for businesses with strict data sovereignty needs (legal, medical, finance, government) who want their CRM on their own server.
Professional install on your server, branded configuration, data migration, and 12 months of support. The code itself is on GitHub. This package is for businesses that want me to install, harden, and stand behind it for a year.
Best for sole traders and small teams of 1 to 5 who want a proper pipeline without the per-seat bill.
Managed hosting on Big Bear infrastructure. Every feature included, daily backups, email support. The first 5 users are included. Need a 6th? Add users for $10 each per month, or jump to Growth at 10 users for unlimited.
Best for growing teams of 6 or more who want unlimited users plus AI briefs and a monthly sounding board.
Everything in Starter plus unlimited users, AI lead briefs, branded sender domain, and a monthly strategy call with Brandon. For businesses doing real volume.
Per-seat pricing sounds small until your team grows. A solo operator paying $25/month suddenly pays $100 when they hire three people. That is not a CRM becoming more valuable. It is the vendor taking more money for the same product.
Big Bear charges per organisation, not per seat. $49/mo on Starter covers the first 5 users. Perfect for sole traders, family businesses, and small crews. Hire your sixth person and you upgrade to Growth at $99/mo, unlimited from there. Two predictable tiers, no surprise invoices.
Big Bear Starter: $49/mo. Big Player A: $24/mo. They are cheaper for solos. Watch what happens next.
Big Bear Starter: still $49/mo. Big Player A: $120/mo. You have just made them 60% cheaper than the alternative.
Big Bear Growth: $99/mo unlimited. Big Player A: $240/mo. Hire freely. Your bill stays put.
Need it on your own server? Professional install plus 12 months of support is $15,000 one-off. The code itself sits open source on GitHub for technical teams who want to install it themselves.
Correct. You pay one flat rate for your whole organisation regardless of how many users you add. Starter is $49/month, Growth is $99/month. Add your PA, your apprentice, your whole team. The bill doesn't change.
Every feature on the Starter plan, for 14 days. No credit card required. At the end you choose to subscribe, downgrade to self-host, or walk away. No pressure, no auto-charge.
The Big Bear CRM codebase is open source on GitHub. Technical customers who are comfortable running their own server can clone the repo and install it themselves, with community support and no fee.
The $15,000 one-off package is for businesses that want me to do it: full install on your server, domain and SSL configuration, data migration from your existing system (up to 2,000 records), and 12 months of support and minor updates. It's the right fit for legal, medical, finance, and government customers who need their CRM on their own infrastructure but don't want to spend two months learning Django to set it up. Roughly 50 hours of my time spread across the install plus the support window.
Yes. The most common integrations built or set up so far include Xero (accounting sync), Stripe (payments), Twilio (SMS), Mailgun and SendGrid (transactional email), and webhooks for Zapier, Make, or n8n. If your stack uses something not listed, ask and I will tell you upfront if it is a fit.
The admin dashboard built into Nathan's Born to Build site is a local-dev variant of this CRM, built from the same codebase. Big Bear CRM is the hosted, multi-tenant version with a self-service signup. Same features, different delivery model.
Hit "Get free trial" and fill in the contact form. I will set up your organisation within 24 hours, send you a login, and walk you through the basics on a 20-minute call. Most businesses are logging leads within the first hour after that.
Nathan has been using Big Bear CRM in production since day one.
"Brandon built me exactly what I needed. A clean site that captures leads automatically and a CRM that keeps the whole pipeline tidy. No agency runaround, no monthly subscriptions, just a tool that works. Wish I'd found him before I burned $8k on a WordPress site that broke every other week."
Try the whole thing. If it doesn't work for your business, walk away. No lock-in, no auto-charge, no sales pressure.
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