Start here
Start free
Three people, a thousand contacts and organisations, 500 MB of files, and the whole core CRM. No card, no time limit, no sales call.
The steps
What happens next
- You give an email address and choose a password, or use a passkey.
- You confirm the address, so we know we can reach you.
- You name your organisation.
- You choose the region your data will live in.
- You are in. There is no step five.
A new organisation starts with thirty days of Professional, which needs no card and lapses to Free on its own rather than to a bill. You can turn that off while you are naming the organisation if you would rather see the free limits from the first day.
Counted rather than estimated. The first form asks for an address and a password, or an address and nothing if you would rather use a passkey. Then you leave for your inbox and follow a link. If you chose a passkey, that link takes you straight in; if you chose a password, it confirms the address and you sign in with the password you have just set, which is one more form than we would like and is on the list to remove. Then a name and a region, with the trial already ticked. Five things to decide, and one of them is permanent.
The typing is a minute. How long the whole of it takes depends on how quickly the message reaches you, which is the one part of this we do not control, so we will not put a number on it. What we can say is that there is no qualification call, no demonstration to sit through, and no one will telephone you afterwards. If a form ever appears asking for your company size and budget before you can use the product, something has gone badly wrong with our judgement and we would like to be told.
If the verification message does not arrive, or a sign in stops working, both are answered at the foot of this page. For what to do in the first hour there is the getting started guide, the import guide for spreadsheets, and the sector pages for the relationship types worth setting up before you import.
The one permanent decision
About the region, which is worth thirty seconds
You choose the European Union or the United States, and the choice is permanent. Naming your organisation creates a database that exists only for it, in that region, instead of a row in a shared table with a region in a column, so changing it later would mean migrating your whole organisation between jurisdictions. One organisation lives in one region: a business that genuinely needs records on both sides runs two, and those two share no records, searches or reports.
If you are a UK or European organisation, or you are not sure, choose the European Union. That is the default and it is right for almost everyone reading this.
There is no United Kingdom region
We would rather write that plainly than let someone go looking for it. The jurisdictions available are the European Union and the United States. A United Kingdom organisation choosing the European Union is the ordinary and correct answer, and it is what we would choose ourselves.
The remedy if you get it wrong is worth knowing in advance: create a second organisation in the right region and import an export from the first. On the first afternoon that costs minutes, and the price rises with everything you have put in since. It is still better to spend the thirty seconds now.
What you get
Six things the free plan actually includes
Enforced by the product rather than described on a page. Reaching a limit produces a refusal with an explanation, not a surprise.
- Three people
- Three members of your organisation, each with their own sign in, their own role and their own entries in the audit trail. Not three seats you share one login between.
- A thousand relationships
- People and organisations together, with connections between them carrying roles and periods. For most small organisations that is a year or more of ordinary use.
- 500 MB of files
- Attachments against records: contracts, drawings, certificates, correspondence, held in object storage in your chosen region.
- The whole core CRM
- Relationships, connections, notes, timeline, tasks, appointments, pipelines with stage history, saved views, custom fields, import and search. Not a reduced version with the useful parts greyed out.
- Every obligation, permanently
- The audit trail, consent records, subject access tooling, two factor sign in and complete export are on the free plan and stay there. An organisation that cannot afford a paid plan does not deserve worse evidence when something goes wrong.
- No card, no clock
- The free plan is not a trial: no countdown, and no moment where it becomes a paid plan because you did nothing. A new organisation does start with thirty days of Professional, which also needs no card and lapses to Free rather than to a bill, and which you can decline at the point you name the organisation. The only thing that ends a free organisation is no one signing into it for a year, with three warnings and an offer of export first.
A portability promise you can only test after paying is not a promise. Run an export on your first afternoon, before you have anything to lose, so you know exactly what it produces.
Which is why export is on the free plan rather than three tiers up.
Before you start
Things worth knowing first
- Consonas is early. The roadmap says plainly what is built and what is not, including the things decided against permanently, and the customers page says why there are no stories on it yet.
- Nothing in the product renames an organisation today, and the name has to be unique here, so give it the name people say out loud rather than the one on the Companies House register.
- Direct support is not included on the free plan. The help centre is open to everybody, as is every legal document on this site including both annexes of the data processing agreement.
- You are the controller of the personal data you put in, and we are the processor. The lawful basis for holding a contact is yours to establish, and the Information Commissioner's Office is who asks you about it rather than us.
- If your procurement requires SOC 2 or ISO 27001, we do not hold either and would rather you knew that before the afternoon than after it.
Accounts and regions
Asked before signing up
I registered and no message arrived. Did it fail?
Almost certainly not. The account exists from the moment you submit, and the message is a separate step that can be delayed or filtered. Look in the junk folder first, then ask whoever runs your mail whether a new sender is being held for review, which is common in organisations that filter aggressively. The link lasts an hour; if yours has expired, registering again with the same address sends a new one rather than creating a second account. If nothing arrives at all, write to hello@consonas.com from the address you used and we will look at what we sent.
What happens if I get the password wrong repeatedly?
Sign in slows down rather than locking you out. A lockout is a good way to let somebody else stop you working simply by guessing at your address, so the delay grows instead, which costs an attacker far more than it costs you. If you have genuinely forgotten it, use the reset rather than guessing: it goes to the address on the account, and it ends every existing session, which is what you want if the reason you cannot sign in is that somebody else has been in.
Should I sign up with a shared address like the one on our website?
Use your own working address. An account is a person, and the audit trail names the person, so a shared mailbox produces entries that name no one. Whoever can read the mailbox can also run a password reset, which makes a shared inbox a poor place to keep the thing that controls the account. If what you want is for the company to own it rather than you, that is ownership, and ownership can be transferred inside the product.
A colleague has already created one. Should I sign up anyway?
No. Ask them for an invitation instead. Two organisations for one business are two separate databases with two separate audit trails, and nothing folds one into the other. The way back is to export from one, import into the other, and ask us to remove the empty one, which is minutes on the first day and a genuine job by the third month.
Why does my password only take effect when I click the link?
Because the first version of this did it the other way and was wrong. It stored the password when it created the account row, so somebody could register an address they did not own, choose a password for it, and wait for the real owner to verify an account they could not then sign in to. The password now travels with the verification token, so whoever proves control of the mailbox gets the password typed alongside that proof.
Why is there a bot check on the form?
Because the free plan is real. A free plan with no card is only viable if it is not also an unlimited supply of accounts to anybody who wants ten thousand of them. The usual alternative, which is asking everyone for a card, charges honest people for the behaviour of dishonest ones.