Matthew Brown

Perry, I sense your frustration and I understand how you are looking at this. Let me clarify a couple of things. Salesforce is not for mom & pops. If you're looking for something free/cheap, and you are a programmer or you are willing to put in a lot of effort, there are things out there. For cheap/free I'd recommend - sugar crm first. It has a version you can download, host, maintain and customize with php. Php developers through odesk or elance you can get offshore 10-15/hr. Next look at Zoho for $12/mo/user. But having experience with both, neither can be configured to run much outside of traditional CRM functionality (emails, basic workflow, lead and opportunity management). I wouldn't try to build any rental inventory tracking modules in them... Salesforce's products have 14 years and over 100M in development behind them. Yes Salesforce is a subscription model (this is a business model called SAS - Software as a Service) and yes you will have to sign a contract. For Group Edition it costs 65/mo/user - group you can only use as a CRM and you do not have API access. To make a rental app you'll need Professional at a minimum and that's going to run you 125/mo/user. So if you are looking for a mom and pop solution, this is out of your price range - I wouldn't even bother unless you have at least .5M in revenue. BUT, if you can afford this, it is a world class platform, extremely powerful, flexible and user friendly and you will see a payback within the first year from increased productivity, better customer support and increased sales. However, you will need consultants to set it up, since it is a business system and has a lot of moving parts, but consultants bring with them best practices that you will benefit from. I've been building internet businesses for 10 years on everything from core PHP to Wordpress to Joomla, etc. I switched to products and consulting via my Salesforce consulting firm because I got tired of building things from scripting languages and spending months debugging and I got away from trying to help lifestyle businesses! So the takeaways are - Salesforce is the best available market cloud solution IF it is within your price range, it is not for mom & pops, and if you decide to use it, you need an implementation partner otherwise you run the risk of having a failed or poorly configured implementation, the latter being a slow fail as opposed to a fast fail.

Emils, I don't think you're going to find freeware to manage a rental business... Or for that matter that you would want to run a business on free software. That said, it sounds like you're feeling the pain of a business run by manual systems, which means the business is at the limit of it's growth potential too. If you can convince the owners they have a problem, my company Cloud Builders crafted many custom rental management solutions for customers using Salesforce's Force.com platform for custom rental applications that include: inventory management, rental tracking, maintenance tracking, group schedules, forecasting, purchasing and most important - marketing automation. If you can get their ear, we'd be happy to talk to them. -Matt