Anguardia vs a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is free and it's fine — until "Follow up" quietly becomes a graveyard nobody scans anymore.
Updated 7 August 2026
The honest answer
A spreadsheet is a completely reasonable way to track a handful of prospects, and Anguardia doesn't pretend otherwise. It doesn't hold any information a spreadsheet technically can't. What it does is the one thing a spreadsheet structurally can't do on its own: know today's date, and put an overdue follow-up in front of you instead of waiting for you to scan every row and remember to.
Where a spreadsheet wins
No dishonesty here — a spreadsheet is the right tool for a lot of solo founders, at least at first.
- Free, and you already know how to use it
- Total structural freedom — no schema, no fields you're forced into
- Genuinely fine under roughly 15 open prospects, reviewed on a fixed weekly schedule
Where it stops being enough
A spreadsheet has no memory of what today is. It won't flag a follow-up as overdue — you have to open it and scan every row, every time, and actually remember to. That's fast at ten rows. Past twenty, the scanning takes longer than the follow-up itself would have, so it stops happening on schedule, and the "Follow up" tab quietly turns into a list of prospects you've lost without meaning to.
Nothing about that is a spreadsheet failing at its job — it was never built to notice dates. It's a row-and-column tool being asked to do the job of a reminder system.
What Anguardia actually adds
Anguardia is not a pipeline tool with stages, quotas, or forecasting — deliberately not. Single-seat accounts only, built around the same three-list mental model most solo founders already use, plus three things a spreadsheet can't do:
- Overdue follow-ups surface on their own instead of requiring a manual scan
- Structured AI research (see the prospect research prompt) becomes a company and contact record automatically, instead of copy-pasted by hand
- Every capture, company, person, and task exports to markdown any time — your data isn't locked in
What it costs
$15 a month, or $150 a year (save $30 — 2 months free on annual plan), after a 14-day free trial — no card required to start. If the trial ends and you don't subscribe, Anguardia goes read-only rather than locking you out: everything stays visible, searchable, and exportable either way.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Anguardia just a fancier spreadsheet?
- Structurally it holds similar information — companies, contacts, follow-ups. The difference is what happens automatically: overdue follow-ups surface without you scanning, and AI research parses into records instead of being retyped.
- When should I actually switch from a spreadsheet to Anguardia?
- Roughly when you're spending more time scanning the sheet for what's overdue than acting on what you find — for most solo founders that's somewhere past 15-20 open prospects at once.
- Can I get my data back out if I stop using it?
- Yes — full markdown export any time, whether or not you're subscribed. There's no CSV lock-in trap; every capture, company, person, and task exports on demand.
- Does Anguardia have pipeline stages or forecasting like a real CRM?
- No, on purpose. It's built for one person tracking their own prospects, not a sales team's pipeline — no stages, no quotas, no shared views.