Timetastic Alternative With a Real Free Plan

Timetastic is a solid, well-liked tool — genuinely well built, especially popular with UK teams, with a clean interface and a smooth request-and-approve flow. None of that is in question.

What's worth knowing before you sign up: there is no free tier. After a 30-day trial, every user is billed monthly, from the first seat. For a lot of small teams, that's a fine trade. For a team under ten people evaluating options, it's worth knowing there are tools in the same category built around a shared calendar that don't charge at that size at all.

The actual comparison isn't features — it's the pricing floor

Feature-for-feature, small PTO tools converge fast: balances, a shared calendar, approvals, holidays, some kind of accrual logic. Timetastic does all of that well. So does most of the category at this point.

The real difference is the floor. Timetastic's floor is "per user, from day one, forever." A tool with a genuine free tier has a floor of zero up to a headcount threshold — meaning a three-person studio pays nothing at all, not a discounted rate.

That distinction matters most exactly where it's least visible: a two- or three-person team doesn't feel per-seat pricing as a crisis, it just quietly becomes one more small recurring charge that never had to exist.

What you get either way

Both tools cover the fundamentals a small team actually needs:

• A calendar everyone can see, so scheduling conflicts get caught before anyone submits a request.
• Approval routing to a manager, with a sane fallback when there isn't one.
• Configurable allowances and basic accrual.
• Company holidays that don't eat into someone's balance.

Where they diverge is what happens at renewal, and what's gated behind a higher plan versus included everywhere.

Feature and pricing comparison

Where Timetastic genuinely wins

• Brand recognition and a long track record, particularly in the UK market.
• A discount program for charities, B Corps, and similar organizations.
• If you're already past ten people and comparing tools you'll pay for either way, the feature sets are close enough that this becomes a UI and integrations preference, not a cost question.

Where a free-forever tool wins

• Under ten people, the cost difference isn't "cheaper" — it's zero versus something, every single month, indefinitely.
• No trial clock. There's no 30-day countdown deciding whether the team commits to a paid plan before everyone's even used it through a full pay period.
• Growing past ten doesn't mean the tool suddenly starts charging for the first time — it means moving up one flat-priced tier, not renegotiating a per-seat number that was already running.

Running the actual math

Per-seat pricing is easy to underestimate because it's small in any single month. It's worth doing the arithmetic once, honestly, rather than eyeballing it.

Take a five-person team. At a per-user monthly rate typical of this category, that's a real recurring line item from the first invoice — one that exists purely because of headcount, not because of anything the team is doing with the product that a free tier couldn't also support. Multiply by twelve months and it's not a rounding error next to payroll software, a project tool, and everything else a small business already pays for monthly.

None of that means per-seat pricing is a bad model — plenty of excellent software uses it, and it scales fairly as a company grows. It just means the honest question for a small team isn't "is this tool good," it's "does this specific feature, at this specific size, need to cost anything at all." For leave tracking under ten people, the answer from several tools in the category — including this one — is no.

What free-forever doesn't mean

Free-under-ten doesn't mean feature-limited-under-ten. The distinction matters because plenty of "free" software tiers exist specifically to get a team hooked before gating the parts they actually need. A free tier that removes Slack, calendar sync, or reporting isn't really free — it's a trial with no expiration date.

Check that before assuming "free" and "full-featured" mean the same thing on whatever you're comparing. On SimplyPTO specifically, they do: the free tier and the paid tiers run the identical feature set, and the only thing that changes as a team grows past ten people is which flat monthly number applies.

Making the switch

The main friction in switching leave tools is never the software — it's the roster and the running balances. Importing a spreadsheet directly into a new tool, including a starting-balance field for days already taken this year, gets a team live without anyone re-entering history by hand or losing track of what they've already used.

If you're still deciding on the tool itself rather than the price, how to choose PTO tracking software has the eight questions worth asking regardless of which product ends up winning, and five ways to track PTO covers the full range from spreadsheet to dedicated software if you haven't ruled out simpler options yet.