Is Excel enough? The real answer in 1 number
The practical threshold sits around 200 active alumni. Below that, a well-kept Excel or Google Sheets file, with two or three tabs and a "last updated" column, honestly does the job. The director or volunteer in charge knows the base by heart, spots duplicates by eye, knows who to call when an email bounces. Friction is low because the human compensates for the structure.
Above 200, entropy starts to outweigh the benefits. Duplicates pile up (3-5% of the file on average after two years), unsubscribes become silent (an alumnus who stops responding is neither "unsubscribed" nor "active"), and GDPR compliance becomes unmanageable manually. An erasure request received by email forces you to dig through every tab, every historical export, every attachment — a 30-minute operation minimum if you want to be clean.
Why 200 and not 500? Because hidden costs aren't linear. With 200 contacts, you keep the base going in 30 minutes a week. With 400, you spend 2 hours. With 800, you spend 6 hours — and you still have 8% of records permanently outdated. Manual work climbs faster than the base, because every duplicate, every update, every reminder adds the cross-checks between files no one had anticipated. The empirical rule: if you spend more than 2 hours a week on your file, you've already crossed the threshold — you just don't know it yet.
3 realistic options: spreadsheet / no-code / dedicated SaaS
Three families of tools exist, with very different costs and ceilings. None is bad in absolute terms — each has its zone of relevance.
Option 1 — Excel or Google Sheets. Direct cost: €0 / year (assuming a suite already in place for something else). The work is manual: data entry, dedup, reminders, exports. No automation possible beyond a VLOOKUP formula. Good below 200 active alumni or for an association just starting out and not yet stabilized in its processes. Cardinal advantage: zero learning curve, zero vendor, zero commitment. Cardinal drawback: as the base grows, the hidden cost in hours explodes.
Option 2 — Notion or Airtable (no-code). Direct cost: €50-300 / year depending on the number of users and features (filtered views, automations, forms). Better than Sheets for multi-user collaboration, change tracking, and creating views filtered by class year or sector. But these tools aren't built for alumni: no native Stripe dues, no events with ticketing, no fine-grained GDPR consent management, no reminder sequences. Good for the 200-500 active range, especially if you have someone who already masters Airtable. Beyond that, you rebuild half an alumni CRM by hand — for the price of a real dedicated SaaS.
Option 3 — Dedicated alumni SaaS (Terrilink, AlumnForce, Hivebrite, HelloAsso for the basic version). Direct cost: €1,000 to €15,000 / year depending on the vendor and community size. Built for the job: structured directory, Stripe dues, events with check-in, employment surveys, integrated GDPR management, automated sequences. Beyond 500 active alumni, it's no longer a question of "if" but of "when". See the guide for choosing alumni software if you're at that stage.
Honest comparison table on 8 criteria
Comparing three families of tools on their sticker price is misleading — what matters is total cost and real capability. Here are the 8 criteria that flip a decision, with an assumed verdict for each.
- Direct annual cost (tool). Excel/Sheets: €0. Airtable/Notion: €50-300. Dedicated SaaS: €1k-15k. Verdict: Excel wins clearly.
- Indirect annual cost (management hours). Excel: 4-6 h/week beyond 300 actives, i.e. ~€10k/year in fully loaded salary time. Airtable: 3-4 h/week, i.e. ~€7k/year. SaaS: 1-2 h/week, i.e. ~€2k/year. Verdict: SaaS wins from 400+ actives onward.
- Real capacity (volume beyond which it breaks). Excel: ~200. Airtable: ~500-700. SaaS: no practical limit. Verdict: SaaS wins outright.
- Automated dues (Stripe, SEPA, automatic tax receipts). Excel: zero. Airtable: Stripe integration possible, but you have to code it yourself. SaaS: native. Verdict: SaaS wins — see the hidden economics of dues.
- Events with registration and check-in. Excel: impossible. Airtable: possible with a third-party tool. SaaS: native. Verdict: SaaS wins.
- GDPR compliance (register, right to erasure, signed DPA with hosting provider). Excel: cobble it all together. Airtable: DPA available, but US hosting — GDPR complex to document under Schrems II. French SaaS: compliant by construction. Verdict: French SaaS wins, especially for a school constrained by its HR leadership.
- Continuity when the director changes. Excel: disaster — everything rests on one person's memory. Airtable: better, but the successor must understand the base structure. SaaS: standardized processes, training in a few hours. Verdict: SaaS wins on operational risk.
- Ability to measure engagement. Excel: no metric without heavy manual work. Airtable: basic dashboards. SaaS: native KPIs (payer rate, churn, events, mentorship). Verdict: SaaS wins — see the 7 KPIs of an alumni network.
Across 8 criteria, Excel wins 1, Airtable wins 0, dedicated SaaS wins 7. Excel's only victory — direct cost — vanishes the moment hours enter the calculation.
Real cost compared over 3 years (case: 600 active alumni)
Take a concrete case: a 600-member alumni association with a part-time (50%) director. Let's calculate the total cost over 3 years for the 3 options, including tool, management time, and missed dues from non-automated collection.
Excel option. Tool: €0. Management time: 6 h/week to keep the base going, handle dues by hand, export for surveys — i.e. ~€25,000 over 3 years in fully loaded salary time (€35/h all in). Missed dues: without Stripe automation, payer rate capped at 12-15%, i.e. ~€15,000/year missed vs a 30% rate achievable with SaaS. 3-year total: ~-€70,000 compared to the optimal scenario.
Airtable option. Tool: ~€600 over 3 years (two licenses). Management time: 4 h/week thanks to views and basic automations — i.e. ~€17,000 over 3 years. Missed dues: short of coding a homemade Stripe integration (rare, fragile), same problem as Excel — ~€15,000/year. 3-year total: ~-€50,000 vs optimal scenario.
Dedicated SaaS option. Tool: ~€9,000 over 3 years (€3k/year for ~600 actives, typical range). Management time: 1-2 h/week — i.e. ~€5,000 over 3 years. Automated dues that take the rate from 15 to 30%: +€15,000/year in additional collection. 3-year total: ~+€25,000 positive balance (additional collection net of tool + time costs).
3-year balance, scenarios compared: Excel ~ -€65k, Airtable ~ -€50k, dedicated SaaS ~ +€25k. The gap between Excel and SaaS over 3 years thus reaches ~€90,000 for this base size — well above the total SaaS cost over the same period. This calculation is conservative: it doesn't value reduced GDPR risk or continuity gain when the director changes.
When Excel remains the right choice (and own it)
Three situations where Excel is objectively the right answer — and switching to SaaS would be gold-plating. First, the volunteer board of a single class (50-150 alumni): contacts are managed almost by ear, the cost of a SaaS isn't justified. Then, a young association (less than 18 months) that hasn't yet stabilized its use cases or budget: paying for a SaaS before knowing what you expect from it leaves you with an underused tool you'll regret paying for.
Finally, the pedagogical case: letting an association live the Excel friction for 12-18 months before migrating. It forces the board to formalize its processes (who chases? what scale? what calendar?) and arrive on the platform with a real demand, not a generic checklist. A successful migration is almost always preceded by an Excel phase that hurt — that pain motivates adoption. Don't migrate by trend or because a competitor did. Migrate because your Excel is cracking, and you know precisely what to automate.
When to migrate now (clear signals)
Conversely, here are the non-negotiable signals telling you the moment has come — postponing 6 months costs more than the migration.
- 3 or more duplicates identified at every export. That's the sign your file no longer holds.
- A GDPR request triggers panic. If "where is my data stored" causes 2 hours of digging, you're off the rails.
- More than 200 payers to chase manually. One person cannot sustain that load without errors.
- Alumni director spending more than 4 h/week on file management. Beyond that, the hidden cost exceeds a SaaS.
- Imminent change of director or board. Migrating before the handover divides operational risk by 3.
If you tick 2 of these 5 signals, migration is no longer a budget question but a calendar one. For the step-by-step method, see our guide to migrating from Excel to an alumni platform in 4 phases — it picks up exactly where this article ends. And to evaluate Terrilink concretely on your current file, head to the alumni product page.