Twenty

What is it?

Twenty is a CRM: the place where a company keeps track of customers, deals and conversations. It’s open source, it looks like software from this decade, and it covers what people actually use day to day — contacts, companies, a visual pipeline, notes, tasks, email sync.

Your data sits in a normal Postgres database on your own machine. You can query it, back it up, or pack it up and leave whenever you want. Nobody can raise the rent on it.

What does it replace?

For most small and mid-size teams, it covers the same ground as Salesforce (from ~$25/user/month), HubSpot (from ~$15/seat/month) or Pipedrive (from ~$14/user/month). Vendors adjust pricing often, so check their sites — but ten people on any of those adds up to a few hundred dollars a month, every month.

What does it cost you?

Zero. No per-user pricing, no record limits, no tiers. You pay for the machine it runs on: your own computer, or a small rented server for a few dollars a month.

Get it running

You don’t need to understand the text below. Copy it, paste it into Claude (or Claude Code), and answer a few questions — mostly where to install and which passwords to use. About ten minutes later you have a CRM.

Set up a self-hosted Twenty CRM on this machine using Docker Compose.

1. Follow the official self-hosting docs at https://twenty.com/developers/local-setup — use the docker compose setup from the twentyhq/twenty repo (packages/twenty-docker).
2. Create the .env file from the provided example, generating strong random values for every secret: the Postgres password, APP_SECRET, and the access, refresh, login, and file tokens.
3. Start the stack with `docker compose up -d` and confirm the server and worker containers stay healthy.
4. Verify the app responds at http://localhost:3000, then walk me through creating the first workspace and admin user.
5. When I'm ready to put it on a domain, set up a reverse proxy with TLS and update the server URL config accordingly.