Free Tier Reality Check: What UK Small Firms Actually Get in 2026, and Where It Runs Out

Nobody gives away software out of kindness. A free tier is a funnel with a friendly name on it, and the whole design brief is to get you close enough to the ceiling that paying feels like relief. That said, a few of them are startlingly good value, and if your firm is two to eight people with one shared inbox and a shoebox of receipts, you can run a lot of the business for nothing.

The trick is knowing what breaks first. Here's our working list for 2026, tested against the sizes of business we actually see on this site.

How we judged them

Three questions, every time. What runs out first — seats, storage, history or features? What does the fix cost per head, per month? And if you walk away, do you get your data out in a usable format? We also docked points for free tiers that have quietly shrunk since most people signed up, because that's the treadmill in action.

Accounting: the best free deal in Britain is a bank account

FreeAgent remains the standout, and it isn't really a free tier at all — it's a bundled perk. Open or hold a business current account with NatWest, Royal Bank, Ulster or Mettle and the full product is free, with double-entry bookkeeping, VAT returns for Making Tax Digital and payroll for directors. The catch is structural rather than stingy: close or switch the bank account and the free subscription goes with it. Also, it's built around limited companies and landlords more than sole traders with simple needs.

Zoho Books has a free plan, but the revenue ceiling knocks out anyone doing serious volume, and you're limited to a single user — fine for a solo consultant, awkward the moment a bookkeeper needs a login.

Xero, QuickBooks and Sage don't do free anymore. Trials only, usually 30 days. If you're paying £20–£35 a month elsewhere, moving your banking to a FreeAgent partner bank is worth more than most software discounts you'll see advertised this month — assuming the bank's transaction fees don't claw it back.

Project management: where 'unlimited' has a ceiling

The word 'unlimited' appears on an awful lot of pricing pages. Read the next line.

• Trello free: generous for a single team — unlimited cards, but the workspace caps out at 10 boards and attachments stay small. Standard sits around £4–£5 per user per month. Break-even is board number eleven.
• Asana free: comfortable up to 10 people, but no timelines and no workload view. Starter is roughly £10–£11 per head, so a five-person team is looking at £600+ a year the day they need a Gantt chart.
• ClickUp free: very wide, with unlimited members, but storage is tiny (100MB) and automation allowances are metered. It's the best free option for a team that lives in one view and doesn't attach much.
• Notion free: fine for notes, less fine as a company wiki, because page history is capped at about a week and guests are limited to ten. Seven days of history is fine until the day you need to know who changed a client's scope.
• Monday free: seats and board allowances that feel generous until the third project arrives.
• Slack free: the classic cliff — roughly 90 days of message history and a small integration allowance. For a support team, that history limit is the whole product.

Rough maths: free project management is worth about £600 a year to a five-person firm. If you're losing more than that in dropped handovers and 'sorry, who was doing that?', upgrade. If you aren't, stay put and stop feeling guilty.

Email: no free lunch on your own domain

Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 both gave up on free business email years ago; expect around a fiver per user per month for the entry plans. That's £180–£250 a year for a three-person firm — not nothing, but email is the one place where cheap tends to be expensive.

Zoho Mail is the genuine exception: free for five users, around 5GB each, one domain. The limitation that matters is that the free plan is web-only — no IMAP or POP, so no hooking it into a desktop client the way you're used to. For a five-person firm that works happily in a browser tab, Zoho's paid Lite tier at roughly a pound a head is one of the cheapest sensible upgrades in the whole stack.

Storage and backup: the quiet shrinking act

This is where free tiers have been eroded most, and most people never noticed the memo.

• Google Drive: 15GB, shared across Drive, Gmail and Photos. Adequate for documents, hopeless for video or design files.
• Dropbox: 2GB. A long way down from the referral-fuelled days when people had 16GB for free.
• OneDrive: 5GB standalone, though a Microsoft 365 subscription bundles a terabyte.
• Backblaze B2: 10GB free, and genuinely useful for off-site copies of small, precious files.

The single best-value move here is dull: pay the £1.59 or so a month for 100GB of Google One and stop managing your inbox like a game of Jenga. Fifteen gigabytes costs you about £1.60 a month to quadruple-plus; that's the cheapest hour of admin you'll ever buy back.

On backup, the free landscape narrowed again when Macrium Reflect Free was retired, leaving AOMEI Backupper Standard and open-source options like Duplicati and restic for the technical. Honestly, though, the cheapest real backup in Britain is a £50 external drive plus Time Machine or Windows File History. Free cloud storage is not backup — a sync deletes as happily as it copies. Keep three copies, two on different media, one off-site.

The keepers

Five free plans we'd happily build a lean UK firm around in 2026:

1. FreeAgent via a partner bank — if you're a limited company doing your own books.
2. Trello free — until board eleven, and not a moment before.
3. Zoho Mail free — five people, browser-first, with a sane paid next step.
4. Notion free — for internal notes only, never for client-facing records.
5. Backblaze B2's 10GB — the off-site copy for things you'd cry about losing.

Honourable mentions: LibreOffice, Bitwarden's free plan, and Canva's free tier for the occasional quote or social post.

The treadmill rule

Write down the number that would force you to start paying — seats, gigabytes, boards, days of history — and check it once a quarter against your actual usage. Then export your data somewhere local on the first of every month. Free tiers get trimmed with very little warning, and the firms that get hurt are always the ones whose only copy of everything lives behind a login they don't control.