ClientVault Pro
A polished, offline-first CRM I built for freelancers who outgrew Notion.
The origin
Every freelancer starts with Notion. It's flexible, free, and for a while it holds. But as a solo agency owner juggling multiple clients, I kept hitting the same wall. Notion tracked my deadlines and goals fine, but it had no memory for the details that make freelance work repeatable. Which exact font did I use for that client's brand six months ago? What resources went into that project? Where's the thread of everything we agreed on? That context lived in my head, scattered databases, and half-remembered files, and every time I lost it, I paid for it later. ClientVault Pro started as a fix for my own frustration, not a product.
The problem, precisely
The tooling landscape forces a bad trade-off. Flexible note apps like Notion are great canvases, but you rebuild freelance structure from scratch every time, and the free tier caps out exactly when you start needing it. Real CRMs are powerful but bloated, subscription-locked, and architected for sales pipelines (leads, deals, funnels), not for a designer tracking deliverables, assets, and client relationships. Nothing in the middle was lightweight, freelance-shaped, fully offline, and yours. That gap is the whole reason this exists.
Design decisions (the why)
Under the hood
Electron main process for the shell, file access and PDF generation; a React, TypeScript and Vite renderer for a fast, typed UI; Tailwind for styling; SQLite via sql.js persisted as a local file; React Hook Form with Zod so bad data never reaches the database; Recharts for reporting visuals; Lucide for icons. The architecture keeps the heavy, breakable work (DB, PDFs, filesystem) in the main process, and the interface fast in the renderer.
Features
A look at the app
What's next
Auto-onboarding: adding a client automatically generates the contract, pricing, SOPs, and SoWs, then queues the first invoice. One entry, an entire relationship scaffolded.
Outcomes
- Replaced multiple disconnected tools with one workspace
- Every client detail lives in one place and stays there
- Open-sourced free for early-stage freelancers
Reflection
I built this for exactly one user: me. But building it made me realize how many early-stage freelancers are in the same spot, doing real client work without the budget for expensive tooling, so I open-sourced it free. The most useful discipline it forced on me was encoding fuzzy freelance habits (how I organize clients, what a "handover" actually contains) into concrete, structured software. Turning your own tacit process into something a program can execute is harder, and more clarifying, than it sounds.