Looking for quite simple CRM for starting bussines to suit our needs

Hello everyone,
I keep digging into that CRM hole and it seems as there's soooo much to choose fromand ironically it's hard to find something that will suit our needs. This task might be hard as we are looking for either free or quite cheap plan as we are a couple just starting out so we are not looking to spend too much money on it just yet. It's just that we've been using excel for everything and since we're getting more customers now we're trying to avoid going into excelhole that can be hard to escape later on!

Here's what we're looking for right now:

• possibility to add clients (their basic information like e-mail, name of the company, phone)
• possibility to add projects and link them to chosen client (information included in the project would be total value, components/products that make the value, expenses so we know the gross profit)
• tasks in those projects or at least description
• possibility to change statuses of projects

Bonus would be if there was possibility to link e-mail accounts there so we can send and receive e-mails through the app and link e-mails to certain deals (this is probably something that would be in the paid plan and we might consider cheap one)

We don't need any kind of automations done yet, it's more so it's easier for us to keep track of clients, projects and deadlines. Something like monday.com looks like something we could use but their first plan require at least 3 seats and we pretty much need only one. So I guess it's more like a clients/projects database rather than full on CRM.
So far the most suitable one was free version of agileCRM but there is no possibility to add expenses to deals which was dealbreaker(pun intended) for us.
Looking forward for your insight guys!