Evergreen as a Freelancer CRM

Freelancers live and die by their relationships. Whether you are a developer shipping contract work, a designer managing multiple retainers, or a consultant juggling advisory engagements, you probably have dozens of active client relationships at any given time. Each one has its own context: project history, billing preferences, communication cadence, and that specific thing they mentioned in last month's call that you really should remember.

The obvious answer is a CRM. But the enterprise options are built for sales teams, not solo operators. Salesforce wants thousands per year and expects you to think in terms of pipelines, opportunities, and conversion rates. HubSpot's free tier is generous until you realize you are the product. Even lighter tools like Pipedrive still frame everything around deals closing, not relationships staying warm.

So most freelancers end up with a spreadsheet. And spreadsheets work until they do not. You lose the thread on when you last spoke to someone. Notes live in a separate document. Follow-up reminders live in your calendar. Context is scattered across three tools that do not talk to each other.

Evergreen is a personal CRM built for exactly this kind of relationship management. It runs entirely on your Mac with all data stored locally in SQLite. Your client data never touches someone else's cloud. There is no subscription to forget about -- it is a one-time $9.99 purchase. And because it is AI-native, Claude can help you manage your contacts directly through the Model Context Protocol.

The key difference from traditional CRMs is that Evergreen is built around people, not pipelines. Every contact is a rich profile with interaction history, markdown notes, tags, and action items. There is no concept of "leads" or "deals" -- just people you want to keep in touch with and the context you need to do it well.

Track Client Interactions

Track client interactions and search with smart filters

Every meeting, email, and phone call gets logged as a timestamped interaction on the contact's timeline. You can see at a glance when you last spoke with a client and what you discussed. No more scrolling through your email trying to reconstruct when that scope change happened.

Smart Search Filters

Evergreen's search is built for power users. Use tokens like tag:active-client to see all current engagements, or touched:<30d to surface clients you have not contacted in a month. Combine filters to get exactly the view you need: find all clients in a specific industry you have not reached out to recently, or all contacts with upcoming action items.

Markdown Notes for Full Context

Each contact has a rich notes field that supports full markdown with autosave. Store project details, hourly rates, communication preferences, technology stacks, and anything else that helps you show up prepared. Notes are searchable, so you can find that one client who mentioned wanting to rebuild their API in Go.

Action Items with Due Dates

Attach follow-ups directly to contacts. "Send proposal by Friday" or "Check in about Q2 budget next month" stay connected to the person, not lost in a generic to-do list. Evergreen surfaces upcoming actions so nothing falls through the cracks.

AI Integration

Connect Evergreen to Claude through MCP and you can ask things like "Who haven't I talked to in 60 days?" or "Summarize my recent interactions with Acme Corp." Claude reads directly from your local database, so your client data stays private while you get AI-powered relationship management.

Evergreen works for anyone who needs to manage professional relationships without enterprise overhead. Freelance developers tracking client projects and contracts. Designers managing ongoing retainers. Consultants maintaining a network of advisory relationships. Writers keeping up with editors and publications. If your work depends on relationships and you want something faster than a spreadsheet and lighter than Salesforce, Evergreen is built for you.

Get Evergreen on the Mac App Store