Who it is for
Who AlumDeck is for
One product, one price, four quite different buyers. The software is identical for all of them. What changes is who owns the hosting account, which modules get staffed, and which limitation is the one that would stop you.
- Licence
- $49 a year, published
- Members and admin seats
- Both unlimited
- Where data sits
- Your server, your database
- Runs on
- Ordinary cPanel shared hosting
Read this bit first
Who should not buy AlumDeck#
The fastest way to be useful is to rule yourself out in two minutes rather than in March.
Nobody will own the hosting account
Self-hosted software with no owner becomes an unpatched site holding personal records. Somebody has to hold the login, apply updates and notice when the site is down. If you cannot name that person today, a hosted platform where patching is somebody's paid job is the safer purchase.
You need to take money online
AlumDeck has no payment gateway. It records gifts and dues that arrived by transfer, card or cash and issues sequentially numbered receipts. There is no card form and no percentage taken, because no money moves through it at all.
You work in a language other than English
The interface is English throughout. There is no translation layer to drop a language file into, no right-to-left support, and month names always print in English. This is not "English first", it is English only.
Your policy requires single sign-on
AlumDeck manages its own accounts, with an administrator approving every registration. If every application has to authenticate through an institutional identity provider, it will not pass that review, and it is not a setting we can talk you into.
One glance
The same product, four different jobs#
What actually changes between these buyers is not the feature list.
| Schools | Colleges and universities | Associations | Developers | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs it day to day | One person, between other jobs | An alumni office of two or three | A committee that turns over | You, then the client |
| The argument that lands | A renewal nobody has to defend | No per-record or per-seat fee | Something the next committee inherits | It deploys where Composer cannot |
| The module that earns its place first | Events and the archive | Mentoring and giving | Committee pages and dues | All of them, in one licence |
| The usual failure mode | The member of staff leaves | IT will not adopt another application | The treasurer's card is cancelled | Customisations lost at the next update |
| What they should read first | For schools | For colleges | For associations | For developers |
Scroll sideways to see every column.
The price, the licence and the software are the same in every column.
Pick one
Read the page that fits you#
For schools
Alumni software is priced for universities with a development office. A school has a spreadsheet, one person doing alumni relations between other jobs, and a budget that has to survive the next governors' meeting.
For colleges and universities
Unlimited records and unlimited admin accounts, against per-record and per-seat pricing. Plus the two questions procurement and IT will ask in the first meeting, answered before you get there.
For alumni associations
Software a volunteer committee can hand over. One small line in the accounts, credentials that transfer with the post, and a missed renewal that takes the logins offline rather than the website.
For developers and agencies
A conventional Laravel and Filament application that deploys on cPanel shared hosting with no SSH and no Composer, shipped as readable source apart from the licence check.
What you are actually installing
One install, two doors#
A public alumni website anybody can read, and a members-only portal behind a sign-in. Both come from the same installation, and the admin panel is a third door for the committee.
What every one of them still has to do#
Four jobs the licence does not remove, whoever you are.
Buy hosting, in the institution's name
Ordinary cPanel shared hosting with PHP 8.3 or newer and MySQL, from about $3 a month. Buy it in the school or association's name rather than a person's, or you inherit the problem you were trying to avoid.
Add one cron line
One line in cPanel runs eleven scheduled jobs: announcements, event reminders, digests, engagement scoring, campaign sending and the nightly backup. Without it nothing looks broken. Things just silently do not happen.
Configure email once
The shipped mail transport writes to a log file, on purpose, so a half-configured install cannot drop mail into a stranger's inbox. Until you enter SMTP details on the settings screen and send the test message, no email leaves the site.
Find two hours a week
Approving registrations, posting the events that are already in the calendar, sending the newsletter. No software removes this, at any price, and an alumni site nobody tends is the most common way one dies.
Questions before you pick a page#
Which of these pages should I read?
Read the one that describes who signs the renewal. A school where one person does alumni relations between other jobs has a different problem from a college with a placement cell and forty batches, and both differ from a volunteer committee that turns over every two years. The developers page is for whoever installs it, whichever of the three is paying.
Is the product different for each of them?
No. There is one product, one price and one licence. What differs is which of the thirteen modules you switch on and who ends up owning the hosting account. An empty module looks worse than a missing one, so turning off what you will not staff is the normal thing to do.
What is the same whoever you are?
$49 a year per installation, unlimited members and admin accounts, every module included, and the data in a MySQL database on hosting you control. Somebody has to own that hosting account, apply updates and set up one cron line. That is the trade, and it does not change with the size of the institution.
What is not in the box for any of them?
No payment processing, so donations are recorded rather than collected. No single sign-on and no CRM connector. No public API. No language other than English. No migration service. Each page below says which of those matters most for that kind of buyer.
One licence, whichever of these you are
$49 a year, unlimited members and admin accounts, every module included, on hosting you already pay for.