The search for a Deputy alternative almost always starts the same way: the roster grows, the per-user fee grows with it, and someone asks whether a scheduling tool should really cost as much as a part-time shift. After twenty-plus years building optimization models professionally, I built my own answer — my free staff scheduling optimizer — and made it free: no per-user fee, no account, and a real solver doing the actual scheduling work.
What Deputy costs
As of this writing, third-party pricing trackers list Deputy at roughly $4.50–$5 per user per month for scheduling, with the combined scheduling-plus-time-and-attendance plan around $6–$7 per user monthly and enterprise pricing by conversation. Fair pricing for what it is — Deputy is a polished, well-reviewed workforce platform, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. But per-user pricing scales with exactly the thing you’re trying to grow: your team. Run the arithmetic once: thirty staff at $6 per user is $180 a month — around $2,160 a year, every year, rising with each hire and unaffected by whether the schedule was actually hard to make that week. The bill is indexed to headcount; the value is indexed to how tangled your constraints are. Those are different curves.
Scheduling versus optimizing — they’re different jobs
Deputy, like most of its category, manages schedules: it distributes them, tracks attendance against them, handles swaps and compliance flags. What it doesn’t do is decide the schedule for you from first principles. The manager still stares at the grid and puzzles out who covers Tuesday’s rush without pushing anyone into overtime. That puzzle — the one that actually costs managers their Sunday evenings — is a mathematical problem with a known solution method — mixed-integer linear programming — and it’s what my tool runs. You declare the constraints: demand by time slot, availability, skills, hour and day limits, break rules. The solver returns the cheapest schedule that satisfies all of them, and prices any shortage it can’t cover so nothing fails silently.
If you want to see the difference concretely, the built-in call-center sample schedules twelve agents across four demand streams — English phone, Spanish phone, chat, and an always-present supervisor — in half-hour slots across a week. Solving that by eye is an evening; the solver does it in seconds and tells you it’s optimal. There are five more samples (clinic, fast food, hotel, retail, warehouse), and shift-pattern basics like the 2-2-3 schedule are easy to encode.
What the free tool does — and what it skips
Everything happens in the browser: enter demand and availability in the grids (autosaved locally), or import your Excel workbook; solve; review coverage; hand-edit any cell and see the exact cost impact of your edit; export the result to Excel. No app to install, no accounts to create, nothing stored on a server.
And the honest other half: there’s no time clock, no payroll integration, no mobile app, no shift-swap notifications. Deputy is a workforce management platform; this is a scheduling engine. Some teams will rightly pay for the platform. Plenty of others only ever needed the engine — they were paying platform prices for the one feature the platform doesn’t actually have, which is the optimization itself.
What switching actually looks like
There’s no migration project, because there’s nothing to migrate into. Load one of the built-in samples first and click Solve, just to watch the mechanics. Then either type your own team into the grids — people, availability, demand per time slot — or export what you have into a simple spreadsheet and import it. The first honest solve usually takes fifteen minutes of data entry for a small team, most of it deciding what your demand actually is per slot, which is a question worth answering regardless of what software you use. Everything autosaves in your browser; nothing is uploaded except the solve itself. When the schedule comes back, check the coverage table before anything else — it shows each demand stream slot by slot, and any shortage arrives priced rather than hidden. Then export to Excel and distribute it however you do today: print, message, or paste into whatever your team already reads.
Common questions
What’s the catch? There isn’t a paywall waiting behind the button. These tools are working demonstrations of optimization models I built over a consulting career — the marketing is the tool being genuinely useful. No account, no trial clock, no upsell email, because there’s no email.
Does it handle labor-law compliance? It enforces the rules you give it — maximum hours, days, break requirements, rest between shifts — and it will never produce a schedule that violates them. What it doesn’t do is know your jurisdiction’s rules for you; there’s no built-in library of state or country regulations the way compliance-focused platforms advertise. You bring the rules; it guarantees the schedule respects them.
Is a solver overkill for a small team? Below a handful of people with stable shifts, honestly, yes. The value shows up when constraints collide — skills, part-timers, coverage minimums, hour caps — because that’s where hand-scheduling starts producing quiet overtime and quiet resentment. If your grid fights back every week — someone always ends up over hours, or a skill is always missing on Thursdays — it’s not overkill, it’s the correct tool arriving late.
Who should use which
Choose a platform like Deputy when the pain is operational: dozens of hourly staff, high swap volume, time-theft concerns, payroll complexity. Choose a free optimizer when the pain is the puzzle: coverage requirements, skills, availability conflicts, and a Sunday evening lost to the grid every single week. And if you’re somewhere in between, nothing stops you from letting the optimizer build the roster and your existing tools distribute it. The solver is free either way, at staff-scheduling.kindoflost.com — I wrote up how it generalized from one client’s rules to any team if you’re curious about what’s under the hood.
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