Halden

Built for the confidentiality constraint

Some businesses cannot put client data in a multi-tenant SaaS. Law-adjacent consultancies, agencies under NDA, anyone with a client whose procurement team asks where the data physically lives.

The usual options are an enterprise CRM that costs more than the team, or a spreadsheet. Halden is the third option.

Deliberately small

• One binary. Drop it on a VPS, point it at Postgres, done. No Kubernetes, no message queue, no Redis.
• No telemetry. Halden makes zero outbound connections you did not configure. This is verifiable — the codebase is 14,000 lines and you can read the network layer in an afternoon.
• No AI features. Nothing reads your emails to summarise them. If that changes it will be an explicit, off-by-default, self-hosted-model feature, and it will be announced loudly.

What it does

Contacts, companies, deals, pipelines, notes, documents and a genuinely good email log. Recurring retainer tracking, because that is how consultancies actually bill. Time tracking that feeds invoices.

What it does not do

Marketing automation, lead scoring, sequences, chatbots, or anything that treats a person as a funnel stage. Consultancies have twelve clients, not twelve thousand leads, and tooling built for the latter actively gets in the way.

Upgrades

Halden ships a single migration binary and supports skipping versions. Upgrading from a year-old install is one command, because the realistic user updates roughly annually.