Most "free plans" in scheduling software are a sales funnel wearing a costume. You build one rota, hit a wall, and discover the export button, the publish button or the second week is behind a card form. We didn't want to do that, mostly because we've been on the receiving end of it while trying to cover a Saturday breakfast shift.
So the smartHOD free tier is a real rota generator. One property, up to five staff, no card, no countdown.
What you actually get for nothing
- **A full manual rota builder.** Shift templates, drag-and-drop, a week grid per property, edit any cell. Uncovered slots are flagged in red so you can see the gap before your breakfast supervisor does.
- **Tasks.** Assign the checklist items that live on scraps of paper behind reception.
- **QR clock-in and printable posters.** Staff scan a printed code at the desk to clock in and out. No GPS, no app install, no location permission.
- **Hours export.** Worked and scheduled hours out to a spreadsheet, which is the thing your accountant actually asks for at month end.
That's not a demo. You can run a five-person property on it indefinitely and never pay us anything.
Who it's genuinely enough for
A single small property with five or fewer people on the roster. A guesthouse with two receptionists, a breakfast person and two housekeepers. A hostel where the owner does half the shifts. At that size the rota isn't a hard optimisation problem — it's a memory problem. You know who wants Fridays off; you just need it written down somewhere everyone can see, with hours that add up at the end of the month.
Software that promises to "optimise" a five-person week is mostly selling you a spinner animation. The honest answer for a team that size is: use the grid, drag the shifts, print the QR code, and get on with your day.
The trade-offs, said plainly
The free tier is deliberately narrow, and it will annoy you in specific ways if you're bigger than it:
- **One property only.** If you run two sites and share staff between them, you can't model that. Splitting people across properties is exactly where manual rotas start leaking hours.
- **Five staff.** Hard cap. A sixth hire means a plan change.
- **No AI scheduler.** Every shift is placed by you, by hand, every week.
- **No payroll module, no compliance tracking.** Those are paid features and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
What the AI scheduler actually adds
This is the part worth being concrete about, because "AI" is doing a lot of unearned work in most marketing copy. When you move to Starter (€14.99/month, up to 15 staff) or above, the scheduler fills a week for you while enforcing rules you set once:
- **Minimum rest hours between shifts**, enforced during generation, not flagged afterwards. A late finish followed by an early start won't get placed in the first place.
- **An overtime ceiling**, so it won't quietly solve your coverage problem by giving one person 58 hours.
- **Weekend balance** — a cap on how many weekend shifts one person picks up inside a rolling window, so the same two people don't carry every Saturday.
- **Contracted hours.** If someone's on 40 hours, the engine keeps pushing until they're near 40, rather than stopping at a tidy-looking four days.
- **Approved holidays and days off** are treated as hard blocks, not suggestions.
- **Per-weekday coverage requirements** — two on breakfast, one on reception, and it tells you loudly when a slot can't be filled.
The honest framing: with five people you can hold all of that in your head. With twelve across two properties, you can't, and the week you try is the week someone works a 22:00 finish followed by a 06:00 start.
The upgrade trigger, in one line
You outgrow the free tier the day you hire a sixth person, open a second property, or catch yourself rebuilding the same rota on a Sunday evening for the fourth week running. Until one of those happens, stay free — we'd rather you upgrade because the maths changed than because we hid the export button.