How would you build and host a CRUD app for a small charity org?

Question

Hi HNers, I'm doing some volunteering for a charity org right now, and the problem I've been asked to solve is that their current system of registering users on their service is all paper based. This is obviously making it really hard to stay on top of what data they have (they operate over multiple locations) and to stay compliant with all the relevant regulations (ie. GDPR).So they need a simple CRUD app that their charity organizers can log into and submit details of the people who use their service. They also need to keep records of which people have attended sessions that they run.My first thought of how to build this would be to start them an AWS account and use RDS to store the data, and then write a simple API app to perform CRUD operations on it which would run on Fargate, then serve up a static front end to call the API.I was wondering if anyone has any better ideas that I might have missed? I'm used to working full time for large tech companies where hosting and maintenance are just a normal part of life, so I'm aware I might have a blinkered view of how to go about this. They're a charity with no full time tech staff so maintenance needs to be minimal, and the cheaper the hosting costs the better for obvious reasons.

arkitaip · Accepted Answer

That sounds crazy complicated for what's essentially a simple CRM. There are TONS of these available as easy-to-use SaaS, probably niche ones for this type of charity too.Also, as usual, the software itself is rarely the problem. Maybe ask yourself why are they still on pen and paper in 2021. My guess? Major resistance to change, employees lacking IT skills, etc. Basically, you will not only have to pick a CRM but manage the organizational change, educate employees, etc.

mrsareen · Answer

Use pantheon.io hosting for a wordpress or drupal hosting, its free if you don't associate a custom domain. In a headless formulation, you can use them free forever! Plus its darn easy to implement CRUD on any of them.Fork a svelte frontend and host it over services like netlify or vercel which too ofcourse are free!

__d · Answer

If there's no off-the-shelf CRM that's suitable, perhaps Airtable might be a suitable platform?

runawaybottle · Answer

Don&rsquo;t hogtie this simple charity with AWS cloud infrastructure, especially if you are not going to always be around.That just sounds so malicious.See how far you can get with a Google spreadsheet.