AttendMe is shutting down: where to move your QR attendance tracking

AttendMe's own site states plainly: "AttendMe is winding down. It will shut down on December 31, 2026, and it's free to use until then." If your school, club or organisation runs attendance through it, you have a deadline and a data export to do.

This guide covers the free replacement route before the paid one, and is written by people who sell one of the options. The bias is disclosed; the facts about AttendMe are quoted from their own pages, checked on 5 September 2026.

Export your data before you do anything else

AttendMe supports exporting an event's attendance as a CSV file. Do that for every event you might need, and do it early rather than in the last week of December. A shutdown date is a date after which support, logins and exports may all be gone, and there is no reason to find out how gracefully it ends.

Keep the exports somewhere durable. If you are moving to a Google Sheet, importing the historical CSVs into a tab in that same spreadsheet means your old and new attendance records live in one place, which is usually what an audit or a term report actually needs.

The important difference: who installs what

This is the thing to check in any replacement, because it is where the effort really sits. AttendMe's own documentation states that "your members will need to download the 'AttendMe by Eventus' app to check in to your events," and that members create a profile with their email, first name and avatar.

That model works when your attendees are a stable, known group — a class, a society, a team — who will install something once and keep it. It works much less well for a rotating group, a public event, contractors, volunteers or anyone attending once. Every person is an install and a signup before they are a data point.

So when comparing replacements, ask two separate questions: what does the attendee have to install, and what does the person recording attendance have to install? Tools differ enormously on this and the marketing rarely leads with it.

Route 1: Google Forms with a QR code (free)

The genuinely free replacement. Build a Google Form with the fields you record, generate a QR code that points at the form URL, and print or project it. People scan it with their phone camera, which opens the form, and they fill it in. Responses land in a Google Sheet automatically.

This replaces AttendMe's core loop closely: a displayed code, attendees checking themselves in, data in a spreadsheet, no cost. If that is what you were using AttendMe for, try this first. Nobody should pay for something a free tool does well.

Its limits are worth stating honestly. Attendance is self-reported, so a person can submit twice or submit for someone else. There is no camera scanner, so it cannot read an existing student card or badge. And there is no per-person code, so you cannot verify that the individual in front of you is the one who registered.

Route 2: a scanner link into your own Google Sheet

The other model inverts the direction: rather than attendees scanning a displayed code, someone on the door scans each person's code. That code can be an existing student card, a printed badge, or a per-person QR code you issue.

In QR to Sheets this is a scanner link: a public URL that opens the camera in any phone browser and writes each scan to your Google Sheet as a timestamped row. The person scanning installs nothing and needs no account, so a volunteer or a staff member can be handed the link an hour before the event.

If you need the sign-up half too, a form can collect registrations and issue each registrant their own QR code by email, which is then scanned at the door. That covers the full loop AttendMe handled, with the sign-up and the arrival landing in the same spreadsheet.

Where AttendMe's model was genuinely better

Two things are worth naming, because a comparison that only flatters the author is not useful. First, a projected code that attendees scan themselves needs nobody standing at the door — one code serves a whole lecture hall, and there is no queue. A staff member scanning each person does not scale the same way for a large seated room.

Second, because members had profiles, AttendMe knew who each person was without anyone typing or scanning an identifier. Replacing that means either issuing people a code, or having them enter something identifying on a form.

If those two properties are what made it work for you, the closest free replacement is the Google Forms route rather than a scanner, and you should try that first.

A note on choosing your next tool

The practical lesson of a shutdown is not that a particular vendor failed. It is that attendance records outlive the software that collected them, and a term of registers is worth more to you than it is to anyone else.

Whatever you move to, prefer a setup where the data lands somewhere you already own, in a format you can read without the vendor. A Google Sheet qualifies. So does a CSV you export on a schedule. The test is simple: if this service disappeared tomorrow, would you still have your attendance history?

Step by step

1. 1

   Export your attendance history first

   Do this before anything else. AttendMe exports event attendance as CSV, and once the service is gone that history is not recoverable. Export every event you may need for records, not only the current term.

2. 2

   Decide which direction your scanning goes

   AttendMe has attendees scan a code you display. Some replacements invert this, with a staff member scanning each person's code instead. Which you want changes what you should pick, so decide before you compare tools.

3. 3

   Try the free Google Forms route first

   Make a Google Form with the fields you record, generate a QR code pointing at its URL, and display it. Responses land in a spreadsheet. If your attendance is simple and self-reported, you can stop here and pay nothing.

4. 4

   Add a scanner only if you need one

   A form cannot read a badge, a student card or a printed code, because a form field is a text box with no camera attached. If your workflow involves scanning something a person already carries, that is the point at which you need a scanner rather than a form.

5. 5

   Point the replacement at a spreadsheet you own

   The lesson of a service shutting down is that data in someone else's platform can become unreachable on their timetable. A Google Sheet in your own Drive stays yours regardless of what happens to any vendor.

6. 6

   Run both in parallel for one event

   Before AttendMe closes, run one real event on both systems. Comparing two attendance lists for the same room is the only test that finds the gaps while you still have something to fall back on.

Frequently asked questions