Dex is a genuinely good product at the thing it's built for: staying in touch with your network. A timeline of every interaction with a contact, reminders to follow up before a relationship goes cold, contacts pulled in automatically from email and calendar so you're not manually logging every conversation. If your problem is "I have hundreds of relationships and I keep forgetting to nurture them," Dex solves that problem well.
The question worth asking before you build a consulting practice around it is whether that's actually your problem — or whether it's one piece of a bigger one.
What Dex is built for: the relationship, not the engagement
Dex's entire data model is organized around a person and your history with them. That's the right shape for a personal network CRM — it's the wrong shape for a consulting practice, where the unit you actually need to track isn't just "my relationship with this person," it's the engagement itself: scope, term, committed hours, renewal date, and which stakeholders are involved on the client side. A contact timeline tells you when you last talked to someone. It doesn't tell you whether their retainer renews in three weeks or whether last month's invoice went out.
No billing or invoicing layer
Dex doesn't include invoicing or billing functionality — it's not built to. That's consistent with its positioning as a personal relationship CRM rather than a practice-management tool, but it means a consultant using Dex is still running invoicing through a separate tool (or a template) with no connection back to the client record. Every invoice is a fresh lookup: what was the rate, what was billed last time, is this client even current.
No proposal or agreement workflow
The same is true of the front end of an engagement. Dex has no structure for turning a relationship into a scoped proposal or a signed retainer agreement — because that was never the job it was hired to do. For a solo consultant or boutique firm, that means the moment a relationship turns into paid work, you're stepping outside Dex entirely: a proposal doc here, a contract template there, an invoice tool somewhere else, none of it connected to the contact record where the relationship actually lives.
Where this actually matters
None of this is a knock on Dex — it's a mismatch, not a flaw. A tool built for personal network maintenance will always look thin next to a practice-management CRM on engagement tracking and billing, in the same way a practice-management CRM would look like overkill for someone whose only goal is remembering to text an old colleague before they lose touch. The question is which problem you're actually solving: staying in touch with a broad network, or running client engagements from proposal to invoice.
What a consultant actually needs on top
If you're past the point of just staying in touch — if you're managing active retainers, tracking renewal dates, and sending invoices tied to specific engagements — you need the contact layer Dex does well plus an engagement layer it doesn't have: retainers, stakeholders, and a straight line from proposal to signed agreement to invoice. That's the gap Retainer is built to close, using the same vocabulary consultants already think in.
Once a relationship is ready to become paid work, the free Retainer Agreement Generator turns the fee, hours, and term into a signed agreement — the step no contact-list CRM, Dex included, is built to handle.