Everything people ask before they trust us with the alumni list

One installation of AlumDeck, with every module in it and no cap on members, users or admins, plus one year of updates and email support. You get the full source code, readable, not encoded.

It covers one live site and a staging copy of that same site. A second alumni site for a different institution needs a second licence.

Your site carries on exactly as it is. There is no kill switch, no countdown in the admin panel and no feature that quietly stops working. There is no licence server for the software to check in with.

What ends is access to new updates and to support tickets. Renewing buys those back whenever you want them, including years later.

PHP 8.2 or newer, and MySQL 5.7 or MariaDB 10.3 or newer. That is ordinary cPanel shared hosting, from roughly $3 a month, and it is very likely what your institution already pays for.

You need about 120 MB for the application itself. Photo galleries are the part that grows, so budget storage for the archive rather than for the software.

You own it and we cannot see it. The records live in a MySQL database on your hosting, inside your own account, in whatever country your host is in. Nothing is sent to us and there is no analytics call home in the product.

This is the whole reason AlumDeck is self-hosted. It also means that if you lose the database, we cannot recover it for you, because we never had a copy.

Yes. Copy the files, export and import the database, point the domain at the new server. It is a standard Laravel and MySQL move that any web developer has done a hundred times.

No permission is needed from us, no export has to be requested, and no licence has to be released before the copy will run.

Honestly: there is no one-click importer for other alumni platforms, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. What you have is a normal MySQL database with a normal schema.

A developer can load a cleaned spreadsheet into it in an afternoon, and that is the route most people take. Budget for that work if you are arriving with thousands of existing records.

Updates are published as new versions you download during your support year. Nothing is pushed to your server and nothing on your site changes until you decide to apply an update.

That cuts both ways. No vendor can break your live site on a Tuesday morning with a release you did not ask for, and no vendor patches it for you either.

Installation problems, bugs, and questions about how a module is meant to work, by email, with a reply within one working day. There is no weekend cover and no phone line.

It does not cover custom development, your host's own faults, or teaching PHP. The support page sets out the line in detail.

Self-hosting removes a vendor from the picture entirely. The records never leave your server, so there is no sub-processor to list, no international transfer to justify, and no data processing agreement to negotiate with us. Cookie consent with categories is built in, and members control what their profile shows.

The other side of that is blunt: you are the data controller and always were. Retention, deletion requests, the lawful basis for holding the records and the privacy notice are yours. Software cannot make an institution compliant.

Logo, colours, menus, footer columns, homepage blocks, per-page SEO fields and which modules are switched on are all in the admin panel, with no code involved.

Beyond that you have the source, so a Laravel developer can change anything. The warning is the usual one: edit the core files and applying future updates becomes your problem, so keep changes as small and as separate as you can.

The interface text lives in Laravel translation files rather than being hard-coded, so another language can be added without altering the application.

AlumDeck ships in English only, and we do not include pre-made translations. Producing one is work for you or your translator, and we would rather say that than let a tick box on a comparison table imply otherwise.

You are. A backup means the files and the database together, and the tools in cPanel do both on a schedule.

Set that up on the day you install, before you have anything worth losing, and test a restore once. This is the most common way self-hosted projects end badly, and it is entirely preventable.

Registrations wait for admin approval, so the directory is not open to anyone who finds the form, and members choose what is public. The application follows the framework's normal protections rather than inventing its own.

Your part: keep PHP and the server patched, run HTTPS, use strong and separate admin passwords, and remove admin accounts when people leave. AlumDeck has not had an independent security audit yet, and we will say so here on the day it does.

Your site keeps running. The code is already on your server, in readable PHP, with no licence server to phone and no cloud service to shut down. That is the single strongest argument for buying software this way.

The realistic downside is equally clear: updates and support would stop, and keeping a Laravel application current would fall to you or a developer you pay. AlumDeck is new and has no customers yet, so weigh that risk with the price in front of you, not behind it.