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 — from $2.50 per user/month for a single location, $5/user/month for multiple locations (read 2026-07-22). A 10-person single-location roster is $25/month.
- Connecteam — a free plan for small teams (read 2026-07-22), then per-user add-on pricing above it.
- Homebase — unusually, a genuinely free tier for a single location (read 2026-07-22), then paid per-location plans (Essentials roughly $24–$30/location/month on today's page) as a flat per-location price rather than per-user.
- Deputy — per-user pricing; its page did not render a price on our 2026-07-22 fetch, so no figure is stated here — check it directly.
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 $59 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 and timesheets, if you want all three staff tools at one price.
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 $59 one-time purchase breaks even in the third month, and then the meter stops — over three years that is roughly $900 rented versus $59 owned, with the roster in your own database. 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 and timesheets 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.