vs. Google Sheets + Forms + Venmo

Run your market on tentpole instead of a stack of spreadsheets.

Almost every farmers market starts on Google Sheets + Forms + Venmo. It works at 8 vendors. It buckles at 20. By 50, you are losing applications, missing booth fees, and dreading every Saturday. Here is exactly what breaks — and what to switch to before it does.

Start a free trial 7 days free · Cancel anytime · We’ll migrate your sheets for free.

What breaks at each stage

Stage	What you do	What breaks
5-10 vendors	Google Form → manual approval → Venmo collected at booth	Nothing yet. Enjoy it.
10-20 vendors	Spreadsheet of vendors, weekly email blasts	You forget to invoice someone. They show up unpaid. Awkward.
20-50 vendors	3 spreadsheets, Mailchimp, Venmo, calendar	Booth assignments are guesswork. Vendor questions pile up in DMs.
50+ vendors / multi-event	Same stack + 4 tabs + a notebook	You stop sleeping Friday nights. Applications get lost. Cancellations get refunded wrong.

What spreadsheets can’t do

Score applications. You read all of them; bad fits waste your Saturday.
Take real payments at scale. Venmo doesn’t scale to 50 booth fees, and the IRS reporting gets ugly.
Auto-assign booths. You move sticky notes around a printed map.
Send vendor reminders without you. Every email is a manual thing.
Handle refunds cleanly. One refund and you’re scrolling Venmo history.
Tell the vendor when their card declines. Because there’s no card on file.
Survive a personnel change. The spreadsheets only make sense to the one person who built them.

What Tentpole does instead

The job	Spreadsheets	Tentpole
Vendor applications	Google Form → manual review	Smart application form + AI scoring
Booth fees	Venmo at booth	Auto-charged on approve, direct to your bank
Booth layout	Sticky notes on printed map	AI builds it in 30 seconds, drag to tweak
Vendor reminders	Manual email blast	Auto-sent day before with arrival time + booth #
Vendor reply drafts	You type each one	AI drafts in your voice, you approve and send
Day-of check-in	Cross names off a printed list	Tap their name on a tablet, done
Reporting	SUMIFS in column G	Built in: revenue, attendance, vendor rankings
If you get hit by a bus	Nobody else can find anything	Anyone on the team can pick it up tomorrow

The honest cost comparison: Spreadsheets are "free" but cost you 15-20 hours a week of admin time. Tentpole Core is $150/mo and brings most of those hours back. If your time is worth even $30/hr, you break even at 5 hours saved per month. Most organizers save more in the first week.

Spreadsheets fight back: the migration objections

"I’ll lose my history."

You won’t. Tentpole imports your vendor list (CSV from Sheets), past events, and contact info. We do the migration for you, free.

"My vendors won’t want to learn new software."

Vendors apply via a public link — no account required to start. The application is one screen. They’ll thank you.

"I have custom columns and formulas."

We’ll preserve them as custom fields on the vendor record. If you’ve built something we can’t replicate, we’ll tell you upfront.

"I can’t pay $150/mo right now."

Try the 7-day free trial. Run your next event on it. If it doesn’t save you 5+ hours, cancel by day 7 and pay $0.

Start free for 7 days Free migration from Google Sheets / Forms / Venmo · takes us less than a day.

Google Sheets, Google Forms, Venmo, and Mailchimp are trademarks of their respective owners. Tentpole is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google, Venmo, or Intuit Mailchimp. Comparisons are based on publicly available information as of June 14, 2026.