A client record for a one-person practice, without the per-seat bill

The problem

An independent professional — coaching, consulting, therapy, anything where the unit of work is a person, a session and a follow-up — accumulates a few hundred contacts and no good place to put them.

Their email and calendar already work. What does not work is remembering what was said three sessions ago, which client is owed a follow-up, and where that document went. The commercial answer is a per-seat CRM at a price built for sales teams, carrying pipeline mechanics they will never use and an ongoing bill for one person.

What it does

Clients, sessions, notes, tasks and files in one place, on a phone and a laptop. A dashboard showing today’s appointments, open tasks and recent mail. Calendar and inbox read live from Google, with the ability to log a message against a client.

How it’s built

The load-bearing decision is what gets stored and what does not. The database holds only what the practitioner types. Everything from Google — calendar, inbox — is fetched live per session and thrown away.

That single rule removes an entire category of work: no sync layer, no staleness, no conflict resolution, and a privacy story that fits in one sentence for a non-technical user. Nothing about their correspondence is ever copied into someone else’s database.

Row-level security scopes every table to the signed-in user, and file attachments live in a private bucket under per-user folders enforced by policy rather than convention.

The decision that mattered

Sign-in is email and password, with Google linked afterwards from inside the app — not Google sign-in.

Google-only is the obvious build: fewer screens, no password to forget. It is also the wrong one here. It makes the client’s Google account the front door to their own business records, so a lost or compromised Google login locks them out of their client history with no independent way back in. Linking after login keeps the two separable — the Google connection can be revoked and re-granted without touching access to the practice records.

Outcome

Built, deployed and in daily use since April 2026. Zero client correspondence mirrored out of Google.