Hermit CRM

Hermit CRM

A free, local CRM for solopreneurs. Your pipeline, contacts and conversations live as Markdown files in git on your own Mac, with a web app for you and a CLI and MCP server for your AI agent. No account, no cloud, Apache 2.0.

Install it with your AI coding agent. Paste this into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or any other:

Read https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Hermit-CRM/hermit-crm/main/INSTALL.md and set up Hermit CRM for me.

Prefer to type the commands yourself? See Install.

Alpha software. Hermit CRM is incomplete, it changes without notice, and

it has bugs nobody has found yet. It is free and comes with **no warranty of

any kind** — nobody is on the hook if it loses your data. Keep your own

backups, and check that they restore. Read DISCLAIMER.md

before you put real work in it.

Your CRM is a folder of Markdown files in git. Every company, contact and conversation is a small text file you can read, grep, edit and diff; every change the app makes is a commit, so the previous version of a file stays in git log and most mistakes are one git revert away. A local web app gives you a pipeline board, a calendar of next steps, message drafts and reports, and because the data is plain files with a small CLI, AI agents (Claude Code, Codex and others) can read and update your pipeline as easily as you can. Hermit CRM is built for one person: a founder, a freelancer, someone doing their own sales.

How it compares

A modest, factual comparison (checked September 2026; corrections welcome):

If you need a team CRM, use one of the others. If you want your pipeline in files you own, Hermit CRM is for you.

Install

With an AI assistant. Paste the line at the top of this page into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or another AI coding tool, or unpack the download, open the folder in one and send it one message:

Read INSTALL.md and set up Hermit CRM for me.

It checks the machine, installs the command, makes your data folder, asks your name and sending addresses, and starts the app. It will not ask you for an app password or a calendar URL: those you type into the Settings page yourself, so they stay on your machine. INSTALL.md is the script it follows.

Hermit CRM runs on macOS. Linux works but is less tested.

By hand. You need Python 3.11 or newer and git:

git clone https://github.com/Hermit-CRM/hermit-crm.git && cd hermit-crm

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate pip install . hermitcrm init ~/crm # a new data folder; asks 3 questions hermitcrm --data ~/crm serve # http://127.0.0.1:8765 hermitcrm --data ~/crm schedule install --serve # daily sync, web app always on

On Debian and Ubuntu, python3 -m venv needs the python3-venv package, and Ubuntu 22.04's Python (3.10) is too old; uv (uv tool install . from the clone) brings its own Python and avoids both.

A download is hermitcrm- .tar.gz and unpacks to hermitcrm- /, with a .sha256 beside it. Check it before you unpack:

shasum -a 256 -c hermitcrm-<version>.tar.gz.sha256   # macOS

sha256sum -c hermitcrm- .tar.gz.sha256 # Linux

Hermit CRM is also on PyPI: uv tool install hermitcrm (or pipx install hermitcrm) replaces the first three lines and gives you a hermitcrm command that works without activating the virtualenv.

hermitcrm init asks three questions: you (your name and sending addresses), BCC capture (the tracking address and its app password) and an online copy (an optional private git remote; local backups start with schedule install or Settings > Backup). Skip any of them; rerun with hermitcrm setup or open the Settings page (/settings) in the web app. Add --demo for thirteen fictional companies, --no-setup to skip the questions. Instead of --data you can set HERMITCRM_DATA=~/crm or run commands from inside the folder.

hermitcrm doctor checks the whole installation in one go. Every page of the web app has a Help link; hermitcrm help [topic] prints the same pages.

Your first company

Want to see a worked account first? The empty home page offers Look at a sample account (or run hermitcrm sample add): one made-up company with its people, messages, a deal on the pipeline and tasks, plus a pinned dashboard and a paused routine to show what you can build. A bar on every page says it is there; Remove it deletes it again in one commit (hermitcrm sample remove), and never touches your own companies.

With the app running at http://127.0.0.1:8765, click New company, type a name and a country, and save. Or do the same from the terminal:

hermitcrm --data ~/crm add company "Acme BV" --country NL --website acme.example.com

company acme created: companies/acme/company.md

Either way one file now exists, and it is the whole record:

~/crm/companies/acme/company.md

name: Acme BV slug: acme website: https://acme.example.com country: NL source: other stage: prospect stage_changed: 2026-09-17 ...

and one commit records it, company: acme created. Open the company page and add a contact, then log the first email:

hermitcrm --data ~/crm add contact acme "Jane Roe" --title CTO --email jane@example.com

hermitcrm --data ~/crm add interaction acme --channel email --direction out \ --contact jane-roe --subject "Intro" --body "Hi Jane, ..."

The contact becomes companies/acme/contacts/jane-roe.md, the mail becomes a file under companies/acme/interactions/, and Acme moves from prospect to engaged because you have now spoken to them. Three files, three commits, git log for the history. hermitcrm show acme prints the lot.

That is the entire data model: a folder per company, a file per contact and a file per conversation. Everything below is convenience on top of it.

Features

• Pipeline board with stages of your own. The defaults are prospect, engaged, discovery, offer, won, lost, disqualified and temporarily disqualified (with a requalify date); rename, add, reorder or remove them in Settings, each with a role (open, won, lost, closed or parked).
• Companies and contacts tables with column filters and sorting.
• Follow-up radar on the home page: the threads where somebody wrote to you and you have not answered, and the ones where you wrote and nothing came back. Also hermitcrm followups.
• Tasks: as many as you like per company or person, one table with date buttons and a filter per column, done dates kept. A company's next step is its task due first.
• Calendar: every task on a month grid, meetings this week and Google Calendar links.
• Pre-meeting brief under every upcoming meeting: stage, open next step, contacts and the last three interactions. Also hermitcrm brief.
• Extension: a bookmarklet that turns the page you are looking at into a filled-in form: a company page into a new company, a LinkedIn profile you are logged in to into a new contact, read in your own tab. Nothing to install.
• Timeline per company: email, LinkedIn, call, WhatsApp and meeting interactions, in or out, with bodies kept byte for byte.
• Generate outreach per contact: one button opens Outreach with that person ready, in English, German, Dutch or French (by country; for Belgium from mails, website, postcode and titles). What you know about them is kept as notes the draft is written from, with wording you control in messages.toml.
• Messages tab: every outbound message with its outcome (successful on a reply, unsuccessful after a window, or set by hand; the choices are outcomes in config.toml).
• Reports: activity per week, funnel and conversion, time in stage, outcomes, message results by language and channel, data hygiene.
• BCC import: BCC or forward mail to a Gmail address and it is logged on the right contact; unmatched mail waits on Home under To file.
• Calendar import: past meetings from a secret ICS feed (no OAuth).
• Import companies or contacts from CSV, TSV or .xlsx.
• Ask Hermit: a question box on every page. The AI answers from the page you are on, or reads the whole data folder (read only) when the page is not enough; retry on the strong model with one click.
• Night mode (on, off or follow the system) and a sidebar with icons.
• On your phone: hermitcrm serve --host 0.0.0.0 puts the app on your local network. It has no password, so use a network you trust or a private one (Tailscale, WireGuard).
• Enrichment: free "fetch from URL" (website or LinkedIn page), or any AI CLI you already use (claude, codex, gemini, grok or a custom command).
• Stage history per company, reconstructable from git.
• MCP server (hermitcrm mcp): read and write the CRM from Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Cursor or anything else that speaks MCP, with no terminal. Ten read tools and seven write tools (records, Make it yours, bulk changes, undo), over stdio, with no extra dependency.
• Feedback form at /help/feedback: writes a report into your folder with the version, counts and feature flags attached, and shows it to you to send. Nothing leaves your machine on its own, and no names or paths go in the report.
• PIPELINE.md: a generated one-page summary for you and your agents.
• Unknown front-matter keys are preserved, so other tools can add fields.

Configuration

hermitcrm init writes config.toml with every key commented out at its default. Uncomment what you want to change.

| port | 8765 | Port of the web app on 127.0