Snipe-IT Is Free — And It Is Not a Fixed-Asset Register. The Difference Costs People Months.

There are two completely different products that both call themselves "asset management," and choosing the wrong one is the most common expensive mistake in this category.

Product A tracks custody. Who has the laptop, when is it due back, which licenses are assigned to whom. Snipe-IT is the category-defining free option here, it is genuinely excellent, and if this is your problem you should stop reading and go install it.

Product B tracks value. What did it cost, what is it worth now, how much depreciation has accumulated, what was the gain or loss when you sold it. This is an accounting artifact. Your accountant asks for it once a year and a custody tracker cannot produce it.

Most articles blur these together. This one does not, because the blur is the problem.

Snipe-IT, credited properly

Snipe-IT is free under AGPL-3.0 — verified on 5 September 2026 at the project repository itself, which reports the license as "GNU Affero General Public License v3.0", rather than inferred from marketing copy — with no restrictions on users, assets or functionality: custom fields, barcode generation, license management, API access, LDAP/SAML integration. Its own site puts the deal plainly: "If you host it yourself, Snipe-IT is completely free", with paid hosting offered beside it. Search for a self-hosted Asset Panda alternative and it is the first name back, every time, and rightly.

If you need to know who has the MacBook, Snipe-IT is free, mature, and better than anything anyone will sell you. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

What it does not do is produce a depreciation schedule your accountant can use. That is not a criticism — it is not what it is for.

The other product: a fixed-asset register

This is the one that answers:

• What is the book value of this asset as at 31 March?
• How much depreciation has accumulated, and how much falls in this financial year?
• We sold the van for £4,000 — what is the gain or loss on disposal?
• Show me the whole schedule, per asset, as a document I can hand to an auditor.

For most small businesses, the answer to all four is currently a spreadsheet somebody built in 2021 that nobody fully understands. And spreadsheets have a specific, well-known failure here: depreciation arithmetic that does not close.

Why the arithmetic is harder than it looks

Straight-line depreciation looks trivial: cost minus salvage, divided by useful life. It is trivial — until the division does not come out evenly, which is most of the time.

Spread £10,000 over 3 years and each period is £3,333.33 — three of which is £9,999.99. Your accumulated depreciation is a penny short of the value you were supposed to write off. Repeat that across forty assets and the register no longer reconciles to the accounts.

The fix is not rounding differently. It is deciding, deliberately, where the remainder goes.

Assetora — a self-hosted fixed-asset and depreciation register, $59.00 one time (product page, read 2026-08-20), one of the three products in the Finance Ops Suite — states its answer explicitly:

Try the Assetora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.

"Every figure is stored and computed in integer cents — floats never touch a value. Straight-line absorbs the rounding remainder in the final period so accumulated depreciation lands exactly on cost minus salvage."

That sentence is the product. Not the feature list — the decision about where the penny goes, made once, consistently, and documented. It is exactly the decision a spreadsheet leaves to whoever last edited the formula.

And it covers reducing-balance as well as straight-line, with book value as at any date, and disposals with gain or loss — which is the calculation people most often get wrong by hand, because it depends on accumulated depreciation being right at the moment of sale.

What the hosted options cost

AssetTiger — from its pricing page (read 2026-09-03):

"30-day free trial · Up to 250 assets · No credit card required" (re-read 5 September 2026), then paid tiers by asset band: Basic 500 assets $220/yr, Core 2,500 $440/yr, Advanced 10,000 $825/yr, Pro 50,000 $1,540/yr, Enterprise 250,000 $3,025/yr — about $18 to $252 a month, each "with 1 month free".

Note the pricing unit: per ASSET, not per seat and not per site. That is a third model, and it suits organizations with many staff and modest asset counts.

This page used to call the 250-asset tier "a genuinely good offer" for a small business, while a later section of the same page correctly called it a thirty-day trial. Both cannot be true, and the trial is the true one. The 5 September 2026 re-read confirms it: thirty days, and on expiry the account goes to view-only unless you upgrade. A trial that leaves your register readable but frozen is a decent way to end a trial — and it is not a free tier, and we should not have called it one.

Asset Panda — from Asset Panda’s own pricing page (read 2026-09-03, re-read 5 September 2026 — still no figure): no public price. Our ledger records it plainly: "the pricing page displays no plan prices — demo and quote CTAs only." What the page offers in place of a number is "Get a personalized quote tailored to your organization's asset management needs", a "Book a demo" button and a sales telephone line.

Third-party comparison sites publish specific annual figures for Asset Panda. We are not repeating them, because the vendor's own page contains no such number. A price that exists only on someone else's website is not a price you can rely on in a budget.

The comparison that actually matters

Read the top three rows and the bottom three rows as two different products, because they are.

Choosing

Snipe-IT — you need custody tracking, you can run Docker, and depreciation is somebody else's spreadsheet. Free, and the right answer for most IT teams.

AssetTiger — you want hosted, want zero server responsibility, and are willing to pay for it. Read the 250-asset tier before you plan around it: on 3 September 2026 its own page describes that tier as a '30-day free trial · Up to 250 assets · No credit card required', not a permanent free plan. Paid tiers start at $20 a month for 500 assets and every one of them includes unlimited users — 'Pay for assets, not seats.'

Asset Panda — you need one platform doing custody and accounting at scale, and a procurement process that tolerates a quote. Ask for the price in the first email.

Assetora — you need the accounting artifact: a depreciation register that closes to the cent, produces book value at a date, handles disposals, and exports a PDF or CSV your accountant will accept. Your realistic alternative is a spreadsheet, and the failure you are trying to prevent is a schedule that does not reconcile.

And the honest combination nobody sells: many organizations should run Snipe-IT for custody and a separate register for depreciation. They answer different questions to different audiences — IT and finance — and forcing one tool to do both is how you end up with an expensive platform that neither team likes.

The limitations, stated

"Is Assetora tax or accounting advice?" — "No. It records the assets and depreciation settings you enter and computes the schedule from them — but the methods, rates, useful lives, and salvage values are yours to set and confirm with your accountant."

That matters more here than in most categories. Depreciation methods and useful lives are set by your jurisdiction's tax rules and your accounting policy. The software does the arithmetic; it does not know what your regulator permits. Anyone selling you compliance in this category is overselling.

"Does it move money or connect to my bank?" — "No — it moves no money and integrates no bank, payment gateway, or general ledger."

No general-ledger integration means the depreciation journal is a manual entry. For most small businesses that is one entry a month or a year, and acceptable. If you need it posting automatically into your accounts, this is not the tool.

The honest costs of self-hosting

Backups are the register. A fixed-asset register is a multi-year record — losing it means reconstructing years of depreciation from purchase invoices. Test a restore before you rely on it.

No custody, no scanning. Covered above. If you need those, you need a second tool or a different one.

Hosting. "SQLite for a zero-config trial, MySQL/MariaDB for production on ordinary shared hosting." For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read on 10 August 2026 from the price API behind its web-hosting and cloud pricing pages — 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

"Asset management" names two products. One tracks who has the laptop; the other tracks what it is worth. Snipe-IT is free and excellent at the first and does not do the second.

If what your accountant is asking for is a depreciation schedule that closes to the cent, a book value as at a date, and a disposal gain — that is a fixed-asset register, and the honest comparison is not against Snipe-IT. It is against the spreadsheet you are using now.

Next steps

• Open the live Assetora demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
• Assetora product page and license options
• Equipment checkout software, honestly compared — the custody half of this category, with the free option named first
• The SaaS Price Observatory — AssetTiger, Asset Panda and every other tracked vendor, quoted from their own pages, with the quote-gated ones recorded as quote-gated

Depreciation methods and useful lives are matters for your accountant and your jurisdiction. This article is about software, not tax.