Equipment Checkout Software — $184 per Admin, Free and Open Source, or $34 Once
Cheqroom publishes $184 per admin per month and a minimum it does not disclose. Shelf.nu is free and open source. Here is the honest three-way comparison, including where the free option beats the one we sell.
Somebody has the good camera. Somebody else has the projector. Neither is written down, and the person who would know left in March.
That is the problem equipment checkout software solves, and it is a genuinely small problem — which makes the price range in this category remarkable. The options run from free to $184 per administrator per month, and the expensive end is not obviously better at the small problem.
Here are all three models, priced from the vendors' own pages, including the free one we do not sell.
What the hosted options publish
Cheqroom — from cheqroom.com/pricing (read 2026-07-05):
"184 Per admin/month" — "We bill annually. Minimum administrator counts apply."
Read the second sentence. The per-admin price is published. The existence of a minimum is disclosed. The size of that minimum is not. You cannot calculate what Cheqroom costs from Cheqroom's own pricing page — you can only learn that there is a number you have not been shown.
For a university media desk or an agency kit room with three people needing admin rights, the visible arithmetic alone is $552 per month, $6,624 a year, $19,872 over three years — before whatever the minimum does to it.
Booqable — from booqable.com (read 2026-07-05):
"$29/month (billed yearly)" — "$35/mo billed monthly" on the Start tier.
Booqable is aimed at rental businesses — it includes an online store, customer-facing bookings, and payments. If you are renting kit to the public for money, that is the correct category and this comparison mostly does not apply to you.
The free option, named first because it deserves to be
Shelf.nu is open-source equipment and asset management. You can self-host it at no cost, or use their managed cloud. It came up as the leading self-hosted answer in every search we ran for this category on 1 August 2026 — including as the top recommendation against Cheqroom specifically.
Its focus, per those results, is "the core equipment circulation loop: scan, check out, book, return, verify", with bookings and custody as a single connected workflow — custody transfers automatically when a reservation begins.
If you are technical enough to run Docker and you want the most capable free option, Shelf.nu is very likely your answer, and you should evaluate it before reading further. We would rather tell you that here than have you find it after buying something.
Also in this space: Yo!Rent (self-hosted, white-label, aimed at rental businesses, sold on a one-time basis) and RentalCore (MIT-licensed, Docker-first, written in Go).
So what is left for a paid one-time licence?
A narrower question than the category implies. Lendra is self-hosted equipment checkout — $34.00, one time (product page, read 2026-08-01).
Its own description of scope is unusually blunt, and it is the reason to consider it:
"Is it going to be bloated and hard to learn?" — "No — that's the whole idea. It's the lending log and nothing else: no depreciation, no tickets, no per-seat licensing."
Three honest differences from the free option:
- Shared hosting, not Docker. "It needs PHP 8+ with PDO — present on virtually every cPanel/Plesk host. The web installer takes about two minutes." If your organisation's IT is a cPanel login and no container platform, that is not a small difference — it is the difference between deployed and not deployed.
- Scope you cannot outgrow into complexity. A lending log that refuses to become an asset-management suite stays learnable by a part-time desk volunteer.
- The rules are tested, and the test count is published. "The check-out/check-in engine ships with an automated test suite (70+ assertions) proving you can't double-check-out an asset, can't lend something in maintenance or retired, and that overdue detection is exact at the due-date boundary."
That third point is the one that matters operationally. The failure everyone has actually experienced is two people were promised the same laptop on Thursday. A tool that provably cannot do that is worth more than one with a longer feature list.
What it does not do
Quoted, not buried:
"Does it work with barcode scanners?" — "Not out of the box — asset tags are typed or searched rather than scanned with handheld-scanner hardware."
If you check kit in and out at volume, scanning is not a nicety — it is the workflow. Cheqroom and Shelf.nu both build around scan-first circulation. A typed-tag system is fine for a hundred items and a few movements a day, and it is the wrong tool for a busy hire desk.
And its answer to "isn't this just a spreadsheet?" is worth quoting because it draws the real line:
"A spreadsheet doesn't stop you double-lending the same laptop, doesn't flag overdue items, doesn't keep a per-person history, and doesn't give five people a shared, always-current view."
The three-year picture
| 36 months | |
|---|---|
| Cheqroom, 3 admins (before the undisclosed minimum) | $19,872 |
| Cheqroom, 1 admin (if the minimum permits it) | $6,624 |
| Booqable Start, billed yearly | $1,044 |
| Shelf.nu, self-hosted | $0 + your hosting and Docker time |
| Lendra | $34 + your hosting |
The row that should give you pause is not the expensive one — it is the free one. A $34 licence has to justify itself against $0, not against $19,872. It justifies itself only on deployment friction and scope, and if neither of those matters to you, take the free one.
Choosing, honestly
Cheqroom if you run a large kit operation where scan-based circulation, maintenance scheduling and signed agreements are the job, and an enterprise line item is normal. Ask what the administrator minimum is before anything else — it is the number that determines your price and it is not on the page.
Booqable if you rent equipment to the public and need a storefront and payments. Different product, different problem.
Shelf.nu if you want the most capable free option and can run Docker. This is the right default for a technical team.
Lendra if you want a lending log that installs on ordinary shared hosting in two minutes, will never grow into an asset-management platform, and whose core rules ship with a published test suite — and you do not need barcode scanning.
A spreadsheet if you have fewer than about twenty items and one person tracking them. Seriously. Software is overhead, and below some threshold the overhead exceeds the problem.
The honest costs of self-hosting either option
Backups are the loan register. Losing it does not lose your equipment — it loses the record of who has it, which is the entire point.
Nobody is on call. If the server is down on the morning of a shoot, the desk falls back to paper.
Hosting. Shared hosting is sufficient for Lendra; Shelf.nu wants a container host. For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read from the price API behind their pricing pages on 10 Aug 2026 — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.
The short version
The category runs from free to $184 per admin per month with an undisclosed minimum on top.
Most organisations tracking a hundred items across a few people need a lending log, not a platform. The free open-source option is genuinely good and should be your first evaluation if you can run Docker. If you cannot — if your infrastructure is a cPanel login — then a $34 one-time licence that installs in two minutes and provably cannot double-lend an asset is a reasonable purchase.
And if you have twenty items and one custodian, close this page and open a spreadsheet.
Next steps
- Open the live Lendra demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
- Lendra product page and licence options
- The SaaS Price Observatory — Cheqroom, Booqable and 80 others, quoted from their own pages and dated
Every price is quoted from the vendor's own pricing page with the date read. Where a vendor discloses a minimum without disclosing its size, that is recorded as the fact it is.