20.tn is DarDev's school management platform for Tunisia—admissions, class lists, fee collection, parent communication, and staff workflows in one product built for how private and public établissements actually operate. We are not shipping a generic ERP with a school skin. We started from director conversations in Tunis and Sfax about paper registers, WhatsApp chaos at fee deadline, and parents who expect digital receipts the way they expect mobile banking.
The product lives at https://20.dardev.net. Outreach to schools runs through Twenty CRM on the same Unified Mailer stack we document in inside-unified-mailer-stack—never as a cold Listmonk blast from the corporate inbox domain. That separation is deliberate: relationship data in CRM, tracked outbound on dedicated sending infrastructure, marketing lists only after explicit opt-in as described in crm-driven-product-lists.
Why Tunisia schools need a purpose-built platform
Tunisian private schools sit between two bad options. Legacy desktop software from the 2000s still sells licenses but does not handle online parent portals or card payments cleanly. International SaaS products look polished in demos yet ignore Tunisian phone habits, French-Arabic bilingual letters, governorate-based reporting, and the reality that many families pay fees in cash at the desk while others want a link on their phone.
Directors told us the same story in different words: the registrar keeps one Excel, the accountant another, and the director's assistant screenshots WhatsApp threads when a parent disputes a payment. Substitute teachers call the office because they cannot see today's timetable without walking to the bureau. None of that is exotic—it is the daily tax of running an établissement with fifty to five hundred students on infrastructure held together with goodwill.
- Single source of truth for students, guardians, classes, and fee schedules
- Parent-facing channel that does not depend on informal messaging apps alone
- Staff roles that match Tunisian school hierarchy—direction, vie scolaire, comptabilité
- Audit-friendly payment history when a family asks what was paid in September
- Room to grow into digital homework and announcements without replacing the core every two years
20.tn targets that gap. We label rollout stages honestly under Deployed Realities—we describe what is in preview, what is in pilot with selected schools, and what is still on the roadmap. We do not claim every module is generally available because a landing page sounds better that way.
Product principles we will not compromise
First, the school owns its data. Exports, backups, and offboarding paths matter as much as onboarding—especially for institutions that survived vendor lock-in once already. Second, mobile-first parent experience is not a nice-to-have in Tunisia; it is how fee reminders get read. Third, bilingual UX defaults: French for official correspondence patterns many schools already use, Arabic where staff and parents expect it on screens and notifications.
Fourth, we build on infrastructure we operate. DarDev runs Twenty CRM, Listmonk, and Stalwart on dardev-vps for our own product outreach—the same patterns in deployed-realities-explained. When we wire 20.tn campaigns, outbound mail uses the product sending subdomain and tracked delivery, not @dardev.net marketing from Listmonk. Root domain mail stays on Zoho for inbound corporate traffic; product outreach stays isolated with aligned SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
What we are building first
Version one focuses on the operational core directors asked for repeatedly: student dossiers linked to guardians, class and level assignment, fee plans with partial payments and receipts, staff accounts with sensible permissions, and a parent portal sufficient to check balances and receive school notices. Integrations with card gateways and local payment habits are staged—we ship the ledger and notification loop before we promise every bank in Tunisia on day one.
Behind the scenes, the 20.tn application runs on dedicated product infrastructure (20tn-vps) while CRM and mail orchestration live on company dardev-vps. That split mirrors how we host Hesabi cloud separately from the internal mailer stack: product uptime and company outreach do not share one blast radius. Ops documents both in the monorepo; DarDev News publishes architecture stories when they are true in production, not when a slide deck needs a diagram.
Go-to-market: one school at a time
We imported hundreds of Tunisian schools from the public ecoles.com.tn directory into Twenty CRM—companies and contacts with consent marked unknown until a director opts in. That import pipeline is CRM-only; no school lands on a Listmonk marketing list because a scraper found an email. Sales staff personalize one message per Person, preview it, get approval, then send. Engagement—opens, clicks, replies—creates tasks in CRM instead of triggering another automated mail.
The sales playbook and workflow orchestration articles on DarDev News explain that motion for staff and engineers respectively. At a high level: quality over volume, roughly aligned with company-wide warm-up pace on outbound infrastructure, and zero tolerance for batch cold blast from newsletter tooling. Schools are not SaaS leads in a CSV; they are institutions with reputations and parent trust.
Early outreach may run in preview mode: staff see queued subjects and recipients in the CRM timeline without delivery to real inboxes until operations enables live sends school by school. We say that plainly rather than documenting workarounds. Live rollout is a deliberate gate, not a hidden switch.
Competitive context without trash talk
Incumbent school software in Tunisia includes long-established vendors and manual processes that work until they do not. International platforms enter conversations with glossy demos but often stumble on localization, support timezone, and pricing in dinars. PRONOTE and other regional names dominate public conversation in France; Tunisian private établissements frequently mix paper, Excel, and niche local tools rather than one dominant cloud.
20.tn does not win by claiming feature parity with every legacy module on slide one. We win when a director sees their actual September fee chase run calmer on phone and portal, when vie scolaire stops retyping the same class list into three places, and when IT—often a deputy director wearing that hat—gets a hosted product with clear data residency on infrastructure DarDev operates in-region.
Roadmap honesty
- CRM prospect import from ecoles.com.tn and targeted outreach workflows
- Core school operations: students, fees, staff roles, parent portal foundations
- Tracked mail engagement synced back to CRM for sales follow-up
- Pilot partnerships with private schools willing to co-design term-two features
- Marketing lists and newsletters only after explicit opt-in—not on cold import
Items further out—deep LMS modules, national exam integrations, hardware turnstiles—stay off the homepage until a school has validated them in production. That discipline is the same Deployed Realities promise we make for Hesabi TTN and DarDevLab: ship, operate, then write the article.
Who this story is for
School directors and owners evaluating digital transformation. IT leads at établissements privés comparing hosted options. DarDev partners who need a credible education vertical without vaporware claims. Internal staff who should know why outreach is CRM-first and why product mail never shares Listmonk lists with Hesabi accountant imports.
If you want the operational detail behind outreach, read 20tn-outreach-one-school-at-a-time and ecoles-scrape-to-crm-pipeline on news.dardev.net. If you implement workflows, read 20tn-crm-workflow-orchestration. For mail architecture, start with inside-unified-mailer-stack and crm-driven-product-lists.
Visit https://20.dardev.net for product information. General inquiries route through DarDev contact channels into Twenty CRM—the same system our team uses to respect your inbox.
Is 20.tn live for every school in Tunisia?
No. Rollout is staged: product preview, pilot schools, and CRM outreach may run before every module is generally available. We publish current status under Deployed Realities rather than implying full GA everywhere.
How is 20.tn different from Hesabi?
Hesabi is fiscal invoicing and TTN compliance for Tunisian SMEs. 20.tn is school operations—students, fees, parents, staff. Different products, different domains, shared DarDev engineering discipline.
Will you add my school to a newsletter if you find our email online?
No. Directory imports land in CRM with unknown consent. Marketing lists update only after explicit opt-in—the same rule we document for other prospect pipelines.
Where is data hosted?
20.tn application infrastructure runs on DarDev-operated VPS in-region. CRM and mail orchestration for outreach use company dardev-vps. We document topology in platform articles as it stabilizes.
Can we request a demo?
Yes. Reply to outreach mail or contact DarDev through news.dardev.net. Sales tasks in CRM prioritize schools that open, click, or reply to tracked intro mail.
