Shift-scheduling software you buy once, not per employee every month
Staff scheduling SaaS charges per employee, forever — a 10-person roster is where it bites. The honest one-time-purchase rota alternative, with today's per-user prices verified and dated, free tiers named first.
Staff scheduling software almost always prices the one way that punishes growth: per employee, per month. Build a rota for a team of ten and you are renting the same weekly grid over and over. Here is the honest case for a shift scheduler you buy once — with the free tiers named first.
What shift-scheduling SaaS actually costs
The pricing model matters more than any single number: most of these charge per user, per month, so the bill scales with headcount. Prices read on the vendors' own pages on 2026-07-22:
- When I Work — Essentials $2.50 per user/month for a single location, Pro $5 for multiple, Premium $8 (read 2026-07-22, re-read 5 September 2026 — unchanged). A 10-person single-location roster is $25/month. *There is no free tier here, only a "14 days"* trial with "No credit card required".**
- Connecteam — the free plan is more specific and more generous than we had it: "all hubs and all features, entirely free for up to 10 users"* (re-read 5 September 2026). And the paid shape is not "per-user add-on pricing" as this page previously said. Each hub is bought separately — Operations, Communications, HR & Skills — and each runs Basic $29, Advanced $49, Expert $99 a month for the first 30 users, with additional users from $0.80 on Operations Basic. *So the meter is a flat block of thirty seats per hub, and a company wanting scheduling and* messaging and HR buys three subscriptions, not one.**
- Homebase — unusually, a genuinely free tier, and the 5 September 2026 re-read pins its two limits: "$0 / location / month for 1 location, up to 10 employees". Above it, Essentials $30, Plus $70 and All-in-One $120 per location per month, each with unlimited employees. That is the opposite meter to everyone else on this list: you are charged for premises and given the people free.
- Deputy — Lite $5, Core $6.50 and Pro $9 per user per month, with a $30 monthly minimum on the monthly plans (read 2026-08-02; the page did not render on our 2026-07-22 fetch). The Deputy cost breakdown runs the three-year arithmetic for a fifteen-person team.
The free tiers (named first — but read the fine print)
Per house style, the free options lead: Homebase (free for one location) and Connecteam (free small-team plan) are genuinely free and can cover a single small team well. The honest caveat is that they are free-but-hosted — your staff roster and personal data live on the vendor's server, and the free tier is the on-ramp to the paid meter as you grow. The open-source self-hosted rota field, by contrast, is thin — there is no strong drop-in to name, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Where a paid, owned tool fits
Rostera is our commercial entry: a one-time $69 purchase with the full PHP source — a weekly rota grid, assigned or open shifts, exact weekly hours per person, double-booking detection, DST-safe shift lengths, and publish / PDF / hardened-CSV export — on ordinary shared-hosting PHP. Live demo, no signup. It is also part of the Workforce Suite alongside leave tracking, timesheets, onboarding checklists and the training matrix, if you want all five staff registers at one price — the stack explained.
Try the Rostera demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
Honest limits, in plain text before you pay: Rostera plans shifts only — it is not payroll, and holds no pay rates or wages. If you need the schedule to calculate wages, it is not your tool.
The three-year arithmetic
Against When I Work at $2.50/user/month for a 10-person roster ($25/month), Rostera's $69 one-time purchase breaks even in the third month, and then the meter stops — over three years that is roughly $900 rented versus $69 owned, with the roster in your own database.
One honest qualification on that example, because it is the exact scenario two competitors give away. A ten-person single-location roster sits inside Homebase's free tier (one location, up to ten employees) and inside Connecteam's (up to ten users) (both read 5 September 2026). So the $900 is what that roster costs at When I Work, not what it must cost. If ten people on one site is your whole operation, take a free tier and stop reading — the comparison in this section starts at the point you outgrow one. The rent-vs-own three-year math runs the full numbers, and the per-employee model means the gap only widens as you hire.
The honest chooser
- Single small team, free-and-hosted is fine: Homebase (one location) or Connecteam.
- Need per-employee wage/payroll calculation: these SaaS platforms or a payroll tool — Rostera does not do wages.
- Want a weekly rota with double-booking protection, bought once, self-hosted, no per-head meter: Rostera, or the Workforce Suite for leave, timesheets, onboarding and training too.
Every vendor figure in this category also lives in the Price Observatory — verified, dated, and source-linked, free to cite — and the calculator turns those figures into your own three-year number in ten seconds. Selected apps can also be hosted for you on Ownware Cloud — the honest trade-off guide covers when that's worth it.