The fear is legitimate
If you've been using desktop software for your theater inventory (and a lot of you have been using CostumeInventory for years), I understand the hesitation about moving to the cloud.
The fear, if I had to put it in one sentence, is: losing control of your data.
What if the internet goes down? What if the company shuts down? What if something goes wrong and I can't get to my own inventory?
Those are valid questions. I'm going to answer them honestly, because I've spent thirty years in IT and I've asked every one of them myself.
I was not a cloud believer
I'll be upfront: I resisted cloud for most of my career. My standard position was that cloud is just someone else's computer, with someone else's failure points, someone else's outages, and someone else in between you and your data.
My corporate direction is still local-first: keep data on infrastructure you control, unless cloud clearly fits a specific need better.
The key phrase there is clearly fits better. Over the years, I've had to admit that some things genuinely do. The first was backup and disaster recovery. Adding offsite backup gave me something I couldn't easily achieve locally: the confidence that if every one of our servers were destroyed, I could restore our entire infrastructure. That peace of mind is hard to buy with on-premises hardware alone.
The second was email. We have a managed fiber connection with an SLA, but in our location, outages still happen. When mail was on-premises, an outage meant delayed or bounced messages, and the outside world noticed. Moving Exchange to the cloud meant that when our site went down, nobody outside knew. Mail kept flowing.
Two separate decisions. Both came down to the same realization: there are specific problems cloud solves better than local infrastructure, and pretending otherwise is stubbornness, not prudence.
The irony of "keeping your data safe" locally
Here's something I've watched happen more times than I'd like to admit.
A user saves a file to their Desktop instead of the network-synced Documents folder. Their hard drive fails. My team replaces the drive, re-images the system, and they're up and running again quickly. But everything they saved to the Desktop? Gone. (To the other IT people reading: yes, I know I could set a policy to redirect the Desktop to the network too. But, reasons...)
They thought they were in control of that data. It was right there on their computer. But "on my computer" and "safe" are not the same thing.
This is the version of data loss that gets theaters, too. The props database on the props manager's laptop. The membership spreadsheet on one volunteer's home computer. The Access database that already crashed once when it hit its size limit, which is exactly what happened at Chilliwack Players Guild before we built Odeumate. Years of inventory, sitting on aging hardware, running software they couldn't even buy anymore.
Local data feels controlled. But control without backup isn't control. It's exposure.
What cloud actually gives a theater volunteer
There's an IT reason cloud makes sense, and there's a theater reason. They're different arguments.
The IT reason is what I just described: backup, redundancy, and recovery you don't have to think about. Your data isn't on a machine that can be dropped, stolen, or corrupted. (Yes, someone else's computer. Turns out that's not always a bad thing.)
The theater reason is simpler.
Picture your props manager in the storage room during tech week, phone in hand, trying to confirm which items are already allocated to the current production before she pulls anything for tomorrow's rehearsal. With desktop software, that information is on a computer she's not standing next to. With a cloud-based system, she has it in ten seconds, right where she's standing.
Now picture the costume lead doing the same thing at the same time, in her own department, on her own inventory, nowhere near the props module. Two people working simultaneously in their own areas. With a client-server application, you could technically support this, but someone would need to set up and maintain a server. And even if you have an IT person in your group, "maintain the theater's inventory server" is a tough ask of a volunteer who showed up to do theater.
Cloud removes the infrastructure problem entirely. Multi-user, any device, no server to maintain, no IT department required.
The honest gap: offline access
I'm not going to pretend there isn't a real downside.
Tech week is stressful. If your internet goes out during dress rehearsal and you can't access your inventory system, that's a problem. I don't have a perfect answer for that. Odeumate has offline caching through its Progressive Web App design, which helps, but it's not a complete substitute for a system that works entirely without internet.
What I will say is this: the same outage that takes down a cloud system can also take down a local client-server system if the server is on-site. And if your "local" system is a spreadsheet on one person's laptop, and that person isn't in the room, you have a different kind of outage. Every system has failure modes. Cloud's failure mode is internet dependency. Local's failure mode is hardware and access.
For most theater use cases (checking out props, updating inventory, looking something up before a meeting), the internet is reliably available. For the specific high-stress moments during tech week, Odeumate's reports let you print a snapshot of your current allocations (checked-out items, production assignments, what's where) and slip it into the stage manager's prompt book. The critical information is on paper, where it belongs during a show.
What if Odeumate shuts down?
This is the question I'd ask if I were you, so let me answer it directly.
The concrete answer: your data is exportable at any time. Every module in Odeumate lets you export to CSV or Excel. Your data is yours, in formats you can open without us. Glenn and Kevin mentioned this in their posts, and I want to echo it: we didn't build a system designed to hold your data hostage.
The honest answer: we're a startup. We have no ten-year track record. Trust takes time to earn, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
What I can tell you is that we set this up for our own theater, Chilliwack Players Guild, and we built it expecting to use it ourselves for a long time. If Broken Leg Software (the company behind Odeumate) ever wound down, our plan is to keep those servers running for our users. That's not a contractual guarantee. It's a commitment from three people who care about this community.
I know "trust us, bro" isn't fully satisfying. So trust the export button. Use it. Know it works. The goal is that you'd never need it, but it's there.
My honest verdict
Local-first is still my instinct for most things. But theater inventory is one of those cases where cloud fits the need better, specifically because of who uses it, how they use it, and where they use it.
Volunteers working from phones. Multiple departments updating simultaneously. No IT staff to maintain a server. Data that needs to be accessible from a prop room, a thrift store, a rehearsal hall.
A childhood commercial keeps coming to mind. There's a kid named Mikey who supposedly hates everything. His brothers push a bowl of cereal toward him, expecting the worst. He tries it.
"He likes it! Hey Mikey!"
I was Mikey. And I'll admit — for this, I like it.
Try Odeumate free at odeumate.com. No credit card, no time limit. Your data is exportable anytime.
Have questions about how your data is stored or protected? I'm the IT guy. Get in touch and I'm happy to talk through it.
Gord is a co-founder of Odeumate and has spent thirty years in IT managing enterprise infrastructure, ERP deployments, and enough hard drive failures to have strong opinions about backup. He's also the reason the servers stay up.