Six tools, one platform: what we replaced to run a 67-agent travel agency

Before HippoHub existed, GOwithHIPPO Travel ran on six SaaS tools that didn't talk to each other. None of them were bad. They just weren't built for what a host travel agency actually does day-to-day — and stitching them together turned simple workflows into multi-tab marathons. This is the breakdown of what we were paying for, what each tool actually did, and what changed when we replaced all of it with one platform.

The stack we were running

Six subscriptions, six logins, six places where data lived. Here's what each one was for:

• VacationCRM — legacy storage for client records and credit card data
• Kajabi — course platform for agent training, plus a community hub for the team
• Shopify + Recharge — agent membership billing (monthly recurring)
• Clickup — Task management/support request system
• Facebook — agent-only community page
• Klaviyo— newsletters and broadcasts to the agent base

Total monthly cost across all six, before any per-seat overage: roughly $1,700/month. For 67 agents. And that's just the subscriptions — it doesn't count the hours someone spent every week reconciling data between them. In addtion, there were holes in the system and GOwithHIPPO was considering moving their VacationCRM platform to Travefy which would have increased the monthly cost to approximately $3,000/month.

Where the cracks showed

The painful moments weren't dramatic — they were small and constant. An agent updates their address but nobody remembers to update it in the systems. A new agent gets added to Klaviyo, but their Kajabi course access is pending until someone manually grants it. A coaching session booked in Calendly doesn't show up in the agent's email inbox, so half the team misses it. Every "single source of truth" lived somewhere — and there were six somewheres.

When you ask agents what the worst part of joining the agency was, it wasn't the work. It was the onboarding. Six tools to log into, six different UIs to learn, six places where their information needed to be kept in sync. For an agency selling a premium experience to clients, the agent experience was scattered.

What we built

HippoHub replaces all six. CRM (contacts, trips, payments) sits at the center, with courses (HIPPOcampus), community (The Watering Hole), email marketing, scheduling, and task management built around it as modules. Plus Perks — supplier deals — which none of the six tools we replaced did well.

The technical decisions: Next.js for web admin, Expo for native mobile, Neon Postgres for data, Clerk for auth, Cloudflare R2 for storage. Multi-tenant from day one, because we already knew we'd want to white-label it for other agencies eventually.

What changed

A few of the things that got better, in plain numbers:

• Monthly SaaS bill: ~$1,300 → one platform fee. We own the infrastructure cost curve instead of paying six vendors who each scale per-seat.
• Agent onboarding: six logins → one. New agents sign in once and see everything they need on their first day.
• Data sync: zero manual reconciliation. Contacts, trips, course progress, payment status — all in one database, no nightly export-import scripts.
• Branding: every email, every page, every member-facing surface is GOwithHIPPO. No "Powered by Kajabi" footer to apologize for.
• Speed of iteration: when an agent suggests a workflow improvement, we ship it the same week. Before, half the requests required filing a feature request with a SaaS vendor who'd never prioritize it.

The part we didn't expect

As I saw how many problems this would solve, out of the gate, I built the system as multi-tenant because I knew that other agencies would face the same problems, and challenges that we were. I built HIPPOhub with GOwithHIPPO in mind but fully capable of serving any host agency ao we made it the first product under Beacon Labs.

That's also why we exist as a studio in the first place. Not every business needs a multi-tenant platform — some need something built specifically for their workflow that doesn't yet exist as a product. The studio path is for those. The product path is for the businesses where the answer is "you have the same problem 50 others have, here's the platform we already built."

If you're running on six tools right now

A few honest questions worth answering before you decide what to do about it:

• How many hours per week does someone on your team spend reconciling data between tools? (If the answer is more than 3, you're paying for those hours twice — once in salary, once in subscriptions.)
• What does your team do that none of your current tools support well? That gap is where workarounds get invented and tribal knowledge accumulates.
• If you woke up tomorrow with one platform that did 80% of what your six tools do today, what would you lose? (Often the answer is "nothing important," and the 20% gap is the part the SaaS vendor was never going to ship anyway.)

If those questions are uncomfortable to answer, that's data. A Systemization Audit is the cheapest way to turn it into a plan — including whether the right answer is a custom build, a product like HippoHub, or just better process. We're plain about all three.