Krystal OSLook for five things: a pipeline with deadlines and a report calendar per grant; a link from each grant to the programs and spend it funds; funder reports generated from that data rather than assembled by hand; connections to the tools you already run on; and pricing that does not climb with your contact list or your team. If a tool covers only the pipeline, you will still rebuild every report from four systems.
The checklist
- Pipeline and calendar: every opportunity with stage, ask, decision date and, once awarded, its report due dates.
- The link to programs: a grant that knows which program it pays for, and a program that knows who funds it, so spend and outcomes land in the right place.
- Reports from data, not from memory: the tool should draft the funder report from what is already recorded.
- Restricted fund tracking: awarded, spent, remaining and burn rate against the calendar, per fund.
- Connections: calendar, bookkeeping, donations and files staying where they are, with the data still landing in one place.
- Pricing that stays flat as you grow, with no per-record or per-seat increases.
Why a grants-only tool is not enough
A grant is only the first link in a chain. The grant funds a program, the program serves people, those people produce outcomes, and those outcomes win the renewal. A tool that holds the grant and nothing else leaves every other link in a spreadsheet, and the chain gets rebuilt by hand each reporting season.
What small organizations pay today
Comparable nonprofit CRMs start at $45 to $139 a month for donor management alone, and most raise the price as the contact list grows. For an organization under $250K that runs one or two programs, that is real money for a tool that still does not hold the loop.
Start with one grant
The fastest way to evaluate any tool is to set up a single grant and one program and see what report it can already write. If the answer is nothing, the tool is a filing cabinet.
How Krystal does it
Krystal OS holds the whole loop: grants, programs, participants and restricted funds in one place, with an AI layer that writes the funder report from live data and never sees a name. It is free forever for up to 500 contacts, and $49 a month flat after that, whatever size you grow to.
Is Krystal a CRM?
Krystal is an operating system for the whole nonprofit, not a CRM. Donor and contact records live in it, but so do grants, programs, participants and restricted funds, connected to each other.
Can we keep the tools we already use?
Yes. Krystal connects to Zeffy, Salesforce, HubSpot, QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks, Sage, Wave, Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, any ICS calendar, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Notion, Slack and Zapier.
How long does setup take?
Set up a single grant and one program, and Krystal will show you the report it can already write. Takes about fifteen minutes.