Free business software is one of the great magic tricks of modern SaaS. It's genuinely free, right up until it isn't - and by the time it isn't, you've usually got two years of customer data locked inside it and no realistic way out.
How the trick works
The free tier is almost never charity. It's a acquisition cost, designed to get your data and your habits embedded in the platform before the meter starts. Once your team relies on it daily and your history lives inside it, the cost of leaving - retraining, migrating data, re-learning a new tool - becomes much higher than the cost of just accepting the next price rise.
Where the real cost actually hides
- Per-seat pricing that quietly doubles as the team grows, exactly when growth is meant to feel like a win
- "Premium" features that turn out to be things you needed from day one, not genuine extras
- Data exports that are technically possible but practically painful, by design
The maths worth doing before you commit
Multiply the per-seat cost by where your team will realistically be in three years, not where it is today. A tool that's cheap for four people can be genuinely expensive for twelve - and by then, switching costs real money and real time on top of the subscription itself. This is the whole logic behind "pay once, own it" as an alternative model: a higher one-off cost up front, but no compounding per-seat bill that scales against you as you grow, and no lock-in if you ever want to leave. It's a trade-off, not a universal answer, but it's one worth actually running the numbers on rather than defaulting to whichever tool had the shiniest free tier.
The verdict
"Free" is a genuinely fair price for software you'll use for a month. It's worth reading the small print before it becomes the system your whole business quietly depends on.