**Yes, genuinely free asset management software exists, but most of what is
advertised as free is a trial wearing a different word.** You get thirty days, or
two users, or two hundred assets, and then the account goes read-only with your
data inside it. That is not free. It is a deposit.
If you are about to spend an afternoon entering four hundred assets, it is worth
ten minutes working out which kind of free you are being offered. There are five
questions that settle it.
Does the free plan expire?
A permanent free tier and a free trial are different products sold under the same
word. Ask what happens on day thirty-one.
If the answer is that the account becomes read-only, you are not choosing a tool.
You are choosing a deadline, and the deadline arrives after you have done the
work of entering everything. That is the point at which switching is most
expensive and the vendor knows it.
The distinction is worth checking in writing rather than inferring from a pricing
page. "Free to start" and "free forever" are not synonyms, and the first is often
used where the second would be untrue.
How many people can actually use it?
This is the limit that causes the most trouble, and it is usually buried.
Asset management is not a single-user job. In practice it involves at least three
people: whoever buys the equipment, whoever hands it to someone, and whoever
walks the stockroom counting things. In a company with more than one site, it is
more.
A plan capped at two users means the third person writes on paper. Within a month
the register no longer matches the building, and a register that does not match
the building is worse than none, because people trust it.
Unlimited users on a free tier is unusual. It is also the single feature that
decides whether the register survives contact with how companies actually work.
What does the next step up cost?
Look at the tier above the free one before you start, not after you outgrow it.
The pattern to watch for is a large jump. If the free tier holds 100 assets and
the next one holds 5,000, you are being asked to pay for fifty times your usage
on the day you add one item too many. Finer bands cost less and, frankly, insult
you less.
Here is what a reasonable ladder looks like:
The thing to compare is not the headline price but the price of the band you
would actually have to buy. A company with 1,200 assets pays for 1,500 here. On a
platform whose bands run 500 then 2,500, the same company pays for 2,500.
Can you get your data out?
Export should be available on the free plan, not held behind an upgrade.
This is the question that makes the decision reversible. If you can leave, you
can try something with very little at stake. If you cannot, every asset you enter
raises the cost of changing your mind, and you will feel that pressure precisely
when you are least happy with the product.
Ask specifically whether export includes the custody history, not only the
current list. The history is the part that took time to accumulate.
Does it do the work that matters?
A free tier is only useful if the product underneath it is worth keeping. The
questions that decide that are duller than the pricing ones:
record you have an inventory, not an asset register.
will audit anything twice.
nobody was watching is the most avoidable cost in the category.
fact. Book value is the number your accountant asks for.
If the answer to those is no, the price stops mattering. A free register nobody
updates is a spreadsheet with extra steps.
What free means at Wurxa
One hundred assets, unlimited users, on every plan including the free one. No
countdown, no card.
Above that, capacity is priced in the steps above, with a conversation rather
than a checkout beyond 15,000 assets.
There is one rule worth stating plainly, because it is unusual. Reading, editing,
reports, checking an asset in or out, running an audit and deleting a record are
never blocked by a capacity limit, on any plan. Only creating a new asset
beyond your capacity is refused, and only when a workspace is set to a hard cap.
The reasoning is simple: billing should never stop a company getting a laptop
back from somebody who is leaving. A product that holds your operations hostage
to your subscription state is not one you should trust with the record of what
you own.
Starting without turning it into a project
The fastest way to know whether any of this suits you is to put twenty real
assets in and see whether it fits how you already work. Not the whole building.
Twenty.
If assigning one to somebody takes less time than writing it on a whiteboard, the
rest will follow. If it does not, you have learned that in an afternoon rather
than after a migration.
What the alternatives mean by free
It is worth being concrete, because "free" is doing different work in different
places.
The dominant product in this category, AssetTiger, offers a free tier of 250
assets. Read the terms and it is a 30 day trial limited to two users, after which
the account becomes view-only. Their paid plans, published on their pricing page,
run from 220 US dollars a year for 500 assets to 1,540 for 50,000.
That is a legitimate model. It is simply not the same word. A 30 day window with
two logins is a trial; 100 assets with your whole team and no end date is a tier.
The other pattern worth naming is the free plan that excludes the feature that
makes the product work. Free, but no label printing. Free, but no export. Free,
but one site. Check which capability is missing before you decide the price is
attractive, because the missing capability is usually the one you were buying.
See what Wurxa Assets includes, or compare the bands on the
pricing page.
Put the workflow into practice.
Start with every Wurxa feature for 14 days. No credit card required.
