An honest comparison
Gevox vs spreadsheets for DPDP compliance work
By Suryansh Sagar, founder of Gevox. Last updated 6 October 2026.
Most DPDP engagements in India are run today on Word templates, an Excel register and calendar reminders, and a careful professional can deliver good work that way. The difference is not the quality of the advice but what the tools cannot do on their own: tell you which of forty clients has a request due on Thursday, notice that a client’s website changed since the last report, or assemble the evidence without an afternoon of copying.
From the Gevox Readiness Index: Of twenty Indian firms that sell DPDP advice, sixteen run their own contact or intake forms through a third party without naming it. The technical obligations are the ones that get missed.
Where spreadsheets win
It would be dishonest to pretend they do not.
- They cost nothing and everyone already knows them.
- They bend to any client, however unusual, without waiting for a feature.
- For two or three clients, a well-kept register and a calendar are genuinely enough.
Where they run out
The trouble starts with the clocks and the count of clients. A rights request has ninety days under Rule 14. A breach has seventy-two hours under Rule 7. A calendar reminder works until somebody forgets to create one, and a spreadsheet never tells you that a client’s website started setting advertising cookies last Tuesday, which is the most common failure under Section 6. At ten clients the register is a discipline. At forty it is a risk.
Task by task
The left-hand column is a competent professional with the usual tools, not a straw man.
| Task | Word, Excel and a calendar | Gevox |
|---|---|---|
| Intake | A questionnaire emailed as a document, answers retyped into the register. | A structured intake by link. Answers land in the client’s workspace once. |
| Website examination | A manual review, or a free cookie checker that reads the page source. | Twenty-two checks in a real browser, recording what the page actually does, each cited. |
| Notice and policies | Templates edited per client. A changed fact is changed by hand in every document. | Generated from the intake. A fact entered once appears wherever it belongs. |
| Rights requests | A register row and a calendar reminder per request. | A register with the ninety-day clock computed live. |
| Breaches | A plan document and a phone call. | A register with the seventy-two hour and without-delay duties tracked separately. |
| Across all clients | Opening each client’s file in turn. | One list of everything due this week, most urgent first. |
| Month two onwards | A re-review when somebody remembers. | Scheduled re-examination and a monthly report of what moved. |
| Evidence | Collecting files into a folder. | A compliance file exported in one step, on Suite. |
| Cost | Nothing beyond time. | From Rs 9,999 a month for 15 clients, the first plan with the registers and monitoring. |
Questions practitioners ask
- Is software necessary to be DPDP compliant?
- No. The Act requires outcomes, not tools. Software matters when the number of clients or the number of live clocks is more than a person can reliably track by hand.
- Can I import my existing spreadsheets?
- The intake and registers are structured, so existing records are re-entered once into each client’s workspace. After that the facts do not need retyping into each document.
- At what point does software pay for itself?
- When the time saved on intake, drafting and tracking across your clients is worth more than the subscription. On Suite that is Rs 375 per client per month.
Read next
Start with three clients
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The Starter Pass is Rs 999 once, for 3 client workspaces with every module unlocked. After that, Suite is Rs 375 per client each month.
The DPDP brief
One email a month. What moved in the Act, and what our scans found.
Every claim cited to its section, the same way these pages are. No product news, no roundups of other people’s blogs.