Replacing a shut-down CRM with Twenty at 90%+ lower cost

The problem

AC&T Education Migration is an Australian agency that helps international students with education provider applications and visas. Their CRM vendor shut the system down and left them with nothing but a CSV export.

They looked at Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive and SuiteCRM. Each was too expensive, too rigid or too generic, and all of them meant renting someone else's structure again. They wanted a system they could own.

What we built

• Twenty as the CRM, with a data model centred on students rather than a generic contact-and-deal pipeline
• Custom workflows for student applications and document tracking
• A nightly workflow that keeps enrolment records and statuses current
• Automated email reminders for key dates
• New records added in under a minute

The result

• CRM costs down more than 90%
• No vendor risk: no surprise pricing changes, shutdowns or forced migrations
• The manual overhead of the old system is gone
• The team kept working the way it already did, just more smoothly