Guide / free inventory, honestly
Free to use inventory software: the honest ladder
"Free to use" means three different things — a spreadsheet, a capped free tier, or a full-product trial. Each covers a different stage, and paying starts when recipes, orders or staff enter the picture.
The key facts
- Genuinely free: a spreadsheet — honest while one person maintains it and volumes stay low.
- Free tiers: real software with caps — users, orders or locations — designed to convert you later.
- Free trials: the full product for a limited time; the only way to test the real workflow for free.
- BSimple is not free: plans start at $180/month (AUD), with a free trial of the full product — no card required to start.
- What free never covers: multi-user concurrency, customer ordering portals, and accounting handoff done for you.
- 01The key facts
- 02What "free to use" actually gets you
- 03Where free stops working
- 04How to use a free trial properly
What "free to use" actually gets you
A spreadsheet is the only option that stays free forever, and it is a legitimate tool at small scale: one person, a few hundred lines, quantities corrected at a count. Its ceilings arrive predictably — two people editing the same sheet, stock that is only right after a stocktake, and purchase orders living in someone's inbox.
Free tiers of cloud tools sit one rung up: a real database, mobile access, maybe barcode scanning. The caps vary by product, but the pattern does not — the features that make inventory management software worth paying for (automation, portals, integrations, more users) are the ones gated behind the paid plan. What the market's free tiers actually include is compared in the free small-business stock software guide.
A trial is the third meaning, and the most useful one: you run the complete product — orders, purchasing, counts, accounting handoff — against your own products before paying anything.
Where free stops working
The breaking points are the same across every free option, because they come from shared records, not features:
- A second person. Concurrency and an audit trail are paid features almost everywhere.
- An order that must be fulfilled. Free tools track stock; they rarely drive pick, pack and invoice from the same record.
- An accountant. Re-keying into Xero or MYOB by hand is the tax free tools quietly charge you.
- Recipes or kits. The moment one product consumes others, arithmetic spreadsheets fail quietly — the raw materials guide shows what that looks like.
Any one of these costs more per month than the software that fixes it, which is the honest way to price the jump.
How to use a free trial properly
A trial wasted on demo data tells you nothing. Load five real products with real quantities, receive a purchase order against one of them, run a stocktake on another, and take a test order from portal to packed to invoiced. If your accounting system is Xero or MYOB, connect it and check the invoice lands the way your accountant needs — the Xero integration is the boundary where operations hands over.
BSimple's trial is the full product: inventory, orders, purchasing, invoicing, portal and reporting, with plans from $180/month (AUD) if it fits. If it does not, the trial cost you an afternoon — that is what a trial is for. When you do compare paid options, what inventory software costs and the lifetime-free landscape are worth reading side by side.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is BSimple free to use?
No — plans start at $180/month (AUD). What is free is the trial: the full product, with your own products and your own data, before you decide. We would rather show you the real workflow than a capped tier that hides it.
What is the best genuinely free inventory option?
A spreadsheet, while it works — it is free forever and honestly matches a one-person operation. The moment a second person, an order workflow or an accountant enters, the errors cost more than software. See the free tools worth trying for what comes after the spreadsheet.
What do free tiers usually leave out?
Typically: extra users, automation, customer portals, deeper reporting and accounting integrations — precisely the features that save the time you would notice. The caps are the business model, not an oversight.
Can I stay free forever?
Some businesses do, happily. The test is consequence: if a wrong quantity has never cost real money, stay free. The first time overselling or a surprise stocktake does, the record has outgrown the spreadsheet.
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