Compare
Almost every donor management product is a hosted subscription, priced by how many records you keep. Mich is a desktop application you buy once — built after the donation software our own small nonprofit relied on made that switch. That single difference changes a lot of things — some in our favor, some not.
| Typical hosted donor CRM | Mich | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | On the vendor's servers | In a file on your computer |
| What you pay | Monthly or yearly, forever | Once, for your major version |
| Price as you grow | Usually tiered by record or contact count | Unchanged — the price is the price |
| If you stop paying | Access typically ends; you export while you still can | Mich returns to the free version's record limits. You keep opening, reading, editing, backing up and restoring your data |
| Who can read your donor list | You, and whoever the vendor permits or is compelled to permit | Whoever knows your master password — which is never stored anywhere |
| Works without internet | No | Yes — activation is online once, then 30 days offline at a time, renewed at each background check |
| Multiple users at once | Yes, with roles and permissions | No — Mich is single-user by design |
| Access from anywhere | Yes, any browser | No — it runs on the computer you installed it on |
| Online donation forms | Usually built in | No — Mich records gifts, it doesn't collect them |
The last three rows are the honest cost of the first six. If your organization needs several people in the database at once, or staff working from different places, a hosted product is the better tool and we'd rather you used one.
Fit
You're tracking gifts in Excel and it's creaking — no receipts, no pledge schedules, no way to see retention.
That spreadsheet comes with you. Save it as CSV and Mich imports your donors and this year's gifts, matching columns as it goes — you don't re-type any of it.
Per-record subscription pricing is hard to justify, and most of the platform would go unused.
A treasurer, an administrator, a founder. Single-user isn't a limitation if there's only one of you.
Donor information you'd rather not hand to a third party — for policy reasons, or because your supporters expect it.
A one-time purchase you can put through once, rather than a renewal to defend every budget cycle.
Receipts and letters merged from your own Word templates, not filled into someone else's layout.
In practice
If your license lapses, Mich returns to the free version's record limits rather than locking you out. You can still open your database, read and edit every record, take a backup and restore one. Nothing needs renewing before you can reach your own donor list.
Donors export to vCard (.vcf), which Outlook, Apple Contacts and Google
Contacts all read. Every report exports to CSV, as does the audit log. There is no export
request, no waiting period, and no tier that unlocks it.
The database is encrypted with a master password that is never stored — not in the file, not in a setting, not on any server. That cuts both ways, and we'd rather be blunt about it: if you lose that password, nobody can recover your data, including us. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe.
Backups go wherever you point them — an external drive, a synced folder, anywhere. Each one is reopened and verified before it counts as a backup, so a corrupt file can't quietly pass as a good one, and restoring takes a snapshot of your current data first.
Install it and look around — the free version is the complete application with record limits, so you can explore every screen and enter real data before deciding anything.