The four things "free" tends to mean

Before comparing features, work out which of these you are being offered. It is usually visible on the pricing page, and occasionally only in the terms.

  • A time-limited trial: everything works, then it stops. Useful for evaluating, useless for running a small team indefinitely.
  • A freemium tier: permanently free up to a limit, usually on headcount, locations or admin accounts.
  • Free to record, paid to retrieve: clocking in is free, but reports and exports — the part that makes the record useful — are not.
  • Free with the cost somewhere else: no subscription, but a per-employee fee, a mandatory hardware purchase, or a paid onboarding step.

Why a seat limit is the most honest kind of free

A free tier capped on headcount is predictable. You know exactly when it ends, it ends because you grew, and nothing is taken away in the meantime.

A free tier capped on features is less predictable, because the feature you need is rarely the one you expected. A team can run for a month before discovering that the monthly summary it needs for payroll sits behind the upgrade.

Neither is dishonest. But the first lets you plan and the second tends to surprise you, so it is worth knowing which one you are on before the team is depending on it.

Five questions to ask before committing a team

These are the ones that determine whether free attendance software is genuinely usable or merely free to install.

  • Does the free tier expire? If so, on what date, and what happens to the records on that date?
  • How many employees, locations and admin accounts does it cover?
  • Where does the time on a record come from — the server, or the employee’s phone?
  • Is location requested only at clock-in, or collected continuously in the background?
  • Can you get your data out, and on which plan does that become possible?

The question most people skip

The time source matters more than any feature list, and it is almost never on a comparison table. If an attendance record carries the time from the employee’s handset, that record reflects a device setting rather than an event. Changing the clock changes the history.

It is a quick thing to test: change the time on a phone, clock in, and see what the record says. A system that reads the server’s clock will disagree with the handset, which is the correct answer.

The other cost that is easy to miss

Software that is free but requires a terminal at the door is not free; it has moved the cost to a purchase order, an installation, an enrolment session per new starter, and another device every time you open a site.

Attendance software that runs entirely on the phones a team already carries has no per-site step at all. That is usually the larger saving, and it is the one that keeps compounding.

Where SlidesClock sits

SlidesClock is free for up to 5 employees at 1 location with 1 admin account, permanently, with no payment card required to start. The whole daily workflow is in it: clocking in and out, personal attendance history, work schedules and leave requests.

What is not in it is stated on the pricing page rather than discovered later. Reports and exports begin at Standard; attendance corrections and the optional payroll tools begin at Premium. Employees clock in from their own phone, so there is no hardware on either plan.

That is one answer among several, and the five questions above are worth asking of it too.