Short answer: “free” on the ERP market means four different things — a trial, a crippled edition, a free tier of a full system, and an open-source licence you host yourself. The software itself really can cost nothing. The bill starts when a second person joins, when external services like fiscal receipts come in, and when the data has to live on your own server.

Why “free ERP” is the most common search

When a business is small, paying for an accounting system feels premature — and that is a fair instinct. First you need to know whether it will stick at all: whether you will actually enter data, whether patience holds, whether a spreadsheet was doing the same job all along.

The trouble is that “free” is four different offers wearing the same word, and people searching for free ERP software often get something other than what they expected.

Four kinds of “free”

A trial. The full system for 14–30 days. After that, access closes and your data stays inside. This is not free software, it is a deferred payment. Fine if you are deliberately testing before buying, bad if you assumed you could work this way indefinitely.

A crippled edition. Runs forever, but with features switched off: no warehouse, no reports, no document printing, or a hard cap on catalogue items. The trap is that you cannot tell in advance which wall you will hit. It usually becomes clear after you have entered six months of work.

A free tier. The system runs in full, with no time limit, but with limits on scale: how many people work at once, how much space your files take. You know where the boundary is up front, and the boundary is about size, not about features.

An open-source licence you host yourself. The software genuinely costs nothing. But it needs a server, someone to install and update it, and backups that somebody has to actually run. The licence is free; the work around it is not. For a business without in-house IT this is the most common way “free” turns expensive — not in money at first, but in the hours of whoever ends up owning it.

What “download for free” quietly includes

The program lives on one computer. Fine while you work alone from the same laptop. The moment there is a second location, a stand-in manager, or a need to check stock from a phone, the workarounds begin: remote access, copied files, “email me the database”.

You are the backup department. And almost nobody is. An accounting database is not a document you can retype in an evening — it is a year of your work. A dead drive, a stolen laptop or ransomware, and there is nothing to restore from.

Updates are yours too. Requirements change, and you go looking for a new version, install it, and check that nothing older broke.

A zero on the price tag usually means you have taken part of the work onto yourself. For some businesses that is an acceptable trade — it just deserves to be a decision, not a surprise.

What free software actually costs

Three line items that never appear in a quote.

Time. Installation, configuration, manual entry of opening balances, monthly reconciliation of spreadsheets. Price your own hour even roughly and the total stops being zero.

Risk. Losing the database is not an inconvenience, it is a stop: you no longer know who owes you, what is in stock, or what to reorder.

Migration. The expensive one. In a year or two you hit the ceiling and move to another system — catalogues, balances, debts and a team learning everything again. So the question is not “what is free today” but “where do I still fit once I grow”.

How the ERPJS free tier works

We chose a free tier rather than a crippled edition. The difference matters: the limit is not on what the system can do, but on the scale it is meant for.

• €0 with no time limit. Not 14 days, not 30 — free for as long as the tier’s limits fit you.
• One user and 512 MB of storage. That is the boundary.
• Nothing is switched off. Inventory, sales, purchasing, customers, finance and reports are the same as on paid plans.
• Nothing to install or maintain. It runs in a browser; backups and updates are our problem, not yours. Your phone works too.
• The AI assistant is included from day one. Connect Claude or ChatGPT to your own books and work in plain sentences: “show me stock levels”, “invoice ten units to this customer”, “who is more than a month overdue”.

About that 512 MB: the bookkeeping itself is light — documents, products, customers and postings take almost no space. What fills it up is attachments: scanned delivery notes, product photos, contracts as files. Store a photo of every item and the ceiling arrives sooner.

One honest detail: a single user cannot be logged into the system and working through the AI assistant at the same time. To do both in parallel you need a separate user for the assistant — and that means a paid plan.

When the free tier is enough, and when it is not

Enough if:

• you are self-employed or a micro business where one person keeps the books;
• you need order in stock, debts and documents rather than automation of a department;
• attachments are occasional — you store documents, not a photo archive.

Not enough if:

• two or more people work at once: someone is selling while someone else posts payments;
• you want the assistant answering in chat while you are inside the system yourself;
• you keep a lot of scans and photos;
• the data must sit on your own server — that is a separate conversation about self-hosting.

What people actually pay for

People. This is the main one. Three users cost €30 per 30 days, six cost €50, and beyond that we quote separately. You are not paying to unlock features — you are paying because a team works in the system.

Storage. More attachments, larger plan.

External services. A fiscal receipt is not our service: fiscalisation runs through a separate operator with its own pricing. Same with bank statements and marketplaces — we make the data flow automatically, but the service itself is third-party.

Configuration for your business. Price lists, discount rules, printed forms, migrating balances from an older system. Micro businesses usually start on their own; where processes are more complex, our involvement is needed — and it is billable.

Self-hosting. If the data cannot live in our cloud, the system is installed on your server. Different model, different economics.

How to start without risking anything

The cheapest way to find out whether a system will stick is to start on the free tier with one job. Do not migrate everything at once: enter products and opening stock, run a week of sales and purchases, then look at the report. If you are still opening it a week later, it works. If not, you have lost a few hours and nothing else.

And do not try to learn the whole system. Connect the AI assistant and simply ask, in your own words, for what you need.

FAQ