An alumni website your school can afford to keep
Alumni software is priced for universities with a development office. Your school has a spreadsheet, one person doing alumni relations between other jobs, and a budget that has to survive the next governors' meeting. AlumDeck is a complete alumni site on hosting you already pay for, for $49 once.
One payment per installation, unlimited alumni records, and a year of updates and support included.
What the alternatives ask a school for every year
Published prices from vendor pricing pages, shown as a yearly figure. Only two of the twelve alumni platforms we researched publish a price at all.
The number that matters is not $49, it is $0 a year
Schools rarely turn down alumni software because it is expensive in the abstract. They turn it down because a recurring cost has to be defended, every year, by somebody, in a meeting, against a maintenance backlog and a coach hire.
AlumDeck takes that decision out of the meeting. It is a one-off $49 licence per installation, which in most schools sits below the threshold that triggers a purchase order or a vendor onboarding form.
What happens at the end of the first year
The licence includes twelve months of updates and email support. After that the software runs exactly as installed, with your data in your own database. Renewing buys new updates and support tickets, nothing else. No kill switch, no countdown.
What you still have to pay for
- Hosting. If the school website already runs on cPanel shared hosting, AlumDeck can usually live on the same account. If not, budget from around $3 a month.
- A domain or, more often, a subdomain such as alumni.yourschool.org.
- Somebody's time. About two hours a week keeps an alumni site alive. Nothing keeps it alive on its own, at any price.
The modules a school uses, and the ones you can switch off
All of it is in the same $49 licence. There is no add-on store, so the giving page and the events module do not turn out to cost extra once you are committed.
A directory built around leaving year
Alumni search by name, batch year, city, country, profession and employer. In a school that means 'who else from the class of 2009 lives near me', which is the search that gets used. Members choose what is public.
Nobody appears unchecked
Every registration waits for a human to approve it, so you can match the name against the school roll before it appears in the directory.
Reunions and speech day
Events with RSVPs and capacity limits, so you know how many chairs to put out and the list closes itself when the hall is full.
The annual fund
A branded giving page and campaign tracking. AlumDeck takes no cut of what you raise, because it is software on your server rather than a platform in the middle.
The archive, at last
Photo albums by era, a school timeline and notable alumni pages. The house photographs in the store cupboard become the reason people visit.
News and newsletters in one place
Publish to the public site and email the same story to members from one admin panel, instead of keeping the mailing list in a spreadsheet and the newsletter somewhere else.
Turn off what you will not staff
Mentoring, the job board and the rest can be switched off. An empty module looks worse than a missing one, and a team of one should run three things properly rather than nine badly.
The old pupils who never log in still need somewhere to look
Most alumni tools hand leavers a members-only login, then wonder why engagement is low. AlumDeck gives you a public alumni site - news, events, galleries, the giving page - with the directory and profiles behind the login.
Every screenshot on this site is a running AlumDeck install. The example is a college, but the modules are identical whatever kind of school you run.
See the screenshot tour
Who does what, in a school with nobody spare
The person doing alumni relations
- Approves new registrations, usually a handful a week
- Posts the events that are already in the school calendar
- Sends the newsletter that used to be a PDF attachment
- Runs the annual appeal from the giving page
- Roughly two hours a week once the site is up
Whoever looks after the school website
- Uploads a zip and creates a database, once, in about ten minutes
- Points a subdomain at the folder
- Applies updates when they are published, the same way
- Checks the backup your host most likely already takes
- An afternoon at the start, then occasional
Nobody at the school has to
- Write code. Logo, colours, menus and homepage blocks are settings
- Buy a separate mailing tool, events tool or donation page
- Negotiate a renewal, a seat count or a record limit
- Ask a vendor to release your data if you ever leave
When a school should not buy AlumDeck
We would rather lose a $49 sale than sell into a school that will be unhappy in March. There are three situations where hosted software is the better answer and we are not.
Nobody will own the hosting account
AlumDeck is self-hosted, so somebody has to hold the hosting login, apply updates and notice when the site is down. If an outside company manages your school website and charges for every change, get their hourly rate and add it to the $49. If nobody will own it, a hosted platform that includes patching is safer for you than we are.
You need a phone number and an account manager
Support here is email, from a small team, included for a year. No phone line, no named account manager, no service level agreement. Schools that need a supplier who can be escalated to should buy one.
You want someone else to do the setup and the migration
There is no onboarding project, no data migration service and no training week. You do the install and the launch yourself with documentation next to you. That is the trade for the price.
What schools ask before buying
Do we have to buy new hosting?
Usually not. If the school website already runs on cPanel shared hosting with PHP 8.2 or newer and MySQL, AlumDeck can sit on the same account, on a subdomain such as alumni.yourschool.org. The installer checks the server before writing a single file and names anything missing, so you can forward that line to your host.
Who has to approve a $49 purchase?
In most schools, whoever can already order books. A one-off licence under fifty dollars normally falls below the threshold for a purchase order or a vendor onboarding form, and there is no renewal to win again next year.
Where is our alumni data stored?
In a MySQL database on your own hosting account, in whichever country your host operates in. Nothing is sent to us.
When you are explaining an alumni database to a data protection officer or a governors' committee, 'it is on the same server as the school website' is a much shorter conversation than a list of overseas sub-processors.
Some of our leavers are only seventeen. Does that change anything?
It is a good reason to keep registration gated. Every account waits for an administrator to approve it, and members control what appears on their public profile. The policy - what age you accept, what you publish, what you keep - is the school's to write, and worth writing down before you launch.
We have two thousand old pupils in a spreadsheet. What happens to it?
Most schools launch with the directory close to empty and let alumni register themselves, because a self-registered record is one the person has confirmed. If you would rather load the spreadsheet in bulk, email hello@alumdeck.com and ask what the import path looks like before you buy rather than after.
What happens if the member of staff running it leaves?
This is the most common way a school alumni site dies, and it is a handover problem rather than a software one. Because AlumDeck sits on the school's own hosting account, the logins belong in the handover file with everything else the school runs, rather than on a subscription tied to one person's card.
Give the alumni office a website instead of a spreadsheet
$49 once, unlimited alumni records, a year of updates and support, and everything sitting on the school's own server.
Checkout is opening shortly. Email hello@alumdeck.com to be told when it does, or to ask anything before then.