After a 9.5-year relationship with Zendesk, a support vendor unexpectedly moved the company to a pricing model four times more expensive with forced annual commitment. When attempting to add agent seats, the process accidentally removed their legacy product hosting nearly a decade of customer support history—approximately 200,000 interactions across brokers and their users. The portal went dark.

Rather than accept the new terms, the company decided to build its own solution in 48 hours. They leveraged existing CRM platform infrastructure with authentication boundaries separate from their internal system. The new design prevented routine CRM deployments from taking down the support portal. They integrated tickets directly into their CRM, connecting support requests with broker identities and work items.

The team worked through nights to complete the ultrahackathon, preserving ticket reference IDs while maintaining existing workflows. Support agents didn't notice the change when the new system went live. They kept the old webhook running for a seven-day overlap period—a courtesy Zendesk had not extended during their abrupt change. The migration maintained business continuity without sacrificing other development priorities.