The best free inventory app is the one that does your real jobs without making you pay for it in hours instead. Free options come in four kinds: a spreadsheet, the free plan of an inventory app, the stock count built into your till or online store, and a free trial of full software. Free plans usually cap how many items, people or locations you can have, and almost always leave out the things a food or craft maker needs most: lots and expiry dates, recipes that take ingredients off stock, and units that convert. So the useful free option is usually a free trial of the full product, run on your own data. Below is what each kind includes, what free tends to leave out, and what free really costs.
The short version
- Four kinds of free: a spreadsheet, a free plan, your till's or store's stock count, or a free trial.
- Free plans are built to be outgrown: caps on items, people, locations or orders.
- Most leave out lots, expiry dates, recipes and unit conversion, which makers need.
- A till or online store counts what it sells, not the ingredients you make it from.
- Free still costs: the hours spent keeping it right, and the stock nobody saw expiring.
- Test full software free for a month, on your own items, before deciding anything.
- TaroStack is free for 30 days with everything included and no credit card. More below.
The four kinds of free
| Kind | What you get | What's usually missing | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| A spreadsheet | Anything you build, shared with your team | Scanning, alerts, history, anything automatic | A few dozen items, one person |
| A free plan of an app | A real app with the basics: items, counts, maybe scanning | Lots, expiry, recipes, more than one site or user | Reselling finished goods, small range |
| Your till's or online store's stock | Units sold come off automatically | Ingredients, batches, anything not sold through it | Selling what you buy, not what you make |
| A free trial | The full product, for a while | Nothing, until the trial ends | Deciding properly, with your own data |
A spreadsheet isn't a bad answer; plenty of businesses run on one for years. If that's where you are, the inventory list with expiration dates is a free template with the date columns most sheets forget. Where a sheet runs out is in inventory software vs a spreadsheet.
What free plans tend to leave out
Read the plan page before you type in a single item. These are the limits that matter, roughly in the order makers hit them:
| Limit | Why it matters to a maker |
|---|---|
| Item cap (often a few dozen or a hundred) | Ingredients, packaging and products add up faster than you think: 30 products can mean 150 items |
| One user | The person counting the walk-in isn't the person in the office |
| One location | The kitchen, the shop and the market stall are three places |
| No lots or expiry dates | You can't use the oldest first or answer a recall |
| No recipes or batches | Making 48 cookies doesn't take the butter off stock |
| No unit conversion | You buy by the case, stock by the each and use by the gram |
| No export, or export on paid plans only | Your own data is hard to take with you |
| Ads, or features that nag to upgrade | Fine, if you can live with it |
The item cap catches makers first. A bakery with 30 products buys flour, butter, sugar, eggs, fillings, boxes, bags and labels, and each of those is an item. If the plan counts items, you're past a small cap before you've entered the packaging.
What free really costs
Free software still has a price; it's paid in hours and in stock. Here's a rough month for a small kitchen running on a free plan with no lots and no recipes:
| Cost | Rough monthly figure |
|---|---|
| Keeping it right by hand: 2 hours a week typing batches and deliveries, at $20 an hour | $173 |
| Stock expiring unnoticed at the back of the shelf | $99 |
| One rush order a month for something that ran out, extra freight | $35 |
| Total | $307 |
The $99 is the write-off worked through in stock rotation methods. Your numbers will differ, so do the sum with yours: if the hours and the waste add up to more than the cost of software that removes them, free is the expensive option. This sum is rough, and that's fine; it only needs to be roughly right to make the decision.
How to test any inventory app for free
Put a real week through it, not a demo. Import your actual item list, have the person who counts do a count on their phone, receive a real delivery, record a real batch, and ask it what to reorder. If each job takes a couple of minutes and nothing needs looking up, it's worth paying for. The five jobs to time, and what to watch for, are in easy-to-use inventory software.
Where this stops working
A free plan works until the day the business does something the plan doesn't. A second person needs to count. A supplier recalls a lot and you need to know where it went. You start making a product instead of reselling it, and the app has nowhere to put a recipe. At that point you're either paying for the next tier of an app that was built around someone else's business, or moving everything again, and moving costs more the longer you've stayed.
How TaroStack does it
TaroStack doesn't have a free plan. It has something more useful: 30 days of the whole product, free, with no credit card, so you can run your real business through it before you decide.
Everything is included in the trial. Lots and expiry dates with the oldest used first, recipes that take ingredients off stock by lot when you record a batch, units that convert (buy by the case, stock by the each, cook by the gram), more than one site, alerts, planning and margins on actual cost. Nothing is held back to make you upgrade halfway through. Counting works on a phone with no signal, and the phone's camera scans barcodes, so you don't need any new hardware to try it.
Getting your data in takes an afternoon, not a weekend. Items, recipes, suppliers, customers and opening stock import from the spreadsheet you already have, with a preview of every row before anything is saved. Or take a photo of a supplier's price list, an invoice or a handwritten count sheet, and it's read into the import's rows for you to check. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.
After the trial, the price is plain. Starter is $49 a month for one site and up to 3 people, with stock, counts, receiving, lots, expiry, recalls and offline counting, and a Shopify or Square connection. Standard is $99 a month for up to 3 sites and 10 people, and adds recipes, batches, true cost and planning. No plan limits how many items you have, so a corner store with 3,000 of them fits on Starter. Pay yearly and two months are free.
And your data stays yours. Every list exports to CSV, on every plan, whenever you want it.
| A free plan | TaroStack | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to try | Nothing | Nothing for 30 days, no card |
| Lots, expiry, recipes | Usually not | Included |
| Item cap | Often | None, on any plan |
| Moving your data in | Retyping, often | Your spreadsheet, or a photo |
| Leaving | Export may cost extra | CSV export, always |