Most people hunting for a When I Work alternative aren’t angry at the product — they’re doing per-user math. Multiply a monthly fee by every employee on the roster, add the time-tracking add-on, and a “cheap” tool quietly becomes a real line item. I’ve built scheduling optimization models for twenty-plus years, and my answer to that math is my free staff scheduling optimizer: it costs nothing, needs no account, and — unlike most scheduling apps — it actually builds the schedule instead of giving you a nicer grid to fill by hand.
What When I Work costs
As of this writing, When I Work’s listed tiers run $2.50, $5, and $8 per user per month, and third-party pricing trackers note that time tracking is an add-on on top of the base price rather than included. None of that is scandalous — it’s honest SaaS pricing with a free trial — but per-user billing has a built-in property worth naming: the bill grows with your headcount, forever. Twenty employees on a mid tier plus time tracking is real money every month, for software you mostly use one afternoon a week.
The part nobody says out loud: scheduling apps don’t schedule
Here’s my professional grievance with the category. Most “scheduling software,” When I Work included, is really schedule management: a shared calendar with availability, swaps, notifications, and a clean mobile app. All genuinely useful. But the hard part — deciding who works when, so that demand is covered, availability is respected, hour limits hold, and labor cost is minimized — still happens in the manager’s head. The software records your decision; it doesn’t make it.
An optimizer inverts that. You state the rules — demand per half-hour, who’s available, who has which skills, minimum and maximum hours — and a mixed-integer programming solver searches the space of possible schedules and returns the cheapest one that satisfies everything. When the solver says a demand can’t be covered, it shows exactly where the shortage is, priced. I wrote about how this model evolved from one client’s rules into a general scheduler if you want the full story.
What the free tool does
You type demand and availability into a grid in the browser (it autosaves locally), or import your existing Excel file. Set shift lengths, breaks, and per-person limits. Click Solve, and a real MILP solver — the same mathematics enterprise workforce systems charge serious money for — returns the lowest-cost schedule it can prove, with a coverage analysis showing exactly how every demand slot is covered. You can then hand-edit any cell — swap someone out, add someone in — and the tool immediately prices your edit against the solved optimum, so you know what a manual override actually costs before you commit to it. Export back to Excel and you’re done. There are built-in samples for six industries (call center, clinic, fast food, hotel, retail, warehouse), so you can see it work before entering a single cell of your own data.
A confession from the build: I assumed a model this small would solve instantly, and my first deployment took minutes per solve until I understood why a tiny scheduling MILP crawled under one solver and flew under another. It solves in seconds now (the humbling was free of charge).
What it isn’t — an honest comparison
If what you need is the workforce-management wrapper — mobile shift swaps, push notifications, a time clock, payroll integrations, team messaging — When I Work earns its fee, and my tool doesn’t try to compete there. There’s no app, no accounts, no clock-in. The honest split: use a workforce app to communicate the schedule; use an optimizer to create it. For a lot of small teams, the optimizer plus the spreadsheet they already have is the whole stack — the schedule gets built by a solver, then travels to the team the same way it always has, and nobody pays a subscription for the privilege of a shared calendar. Other teams will want both layers, and that’s a perfectly sane setup too.
Take a 20-person team on the middle tier. Twenty users at $5 is $100 a month; add the time-tracking add-on at around $2 per user and you’re at roughly $140 a month — about $1,680 a year, growing automatically with every hire. I’m not arguing that’s unfair; I’m pointing out what it buys: distribution and record-keeping. The intellectually hard part of scheduling — the optimization — isn’t in the price at any tier, because it isn’t in the product. That’s the gap a free solver fills, and it’s precisely the part that used to require consultants like me.
Common questions
Can a free tool really replace When I Work? If “replace” means the time clock, the mobile app, and payroll syncing — no, and I won’t pretend otherwise. If it means “get a good weekly schedule without paying per user,” then yes: that’s the entire job this tool does, with a solver most paid apps don’t have.
Do I need to understand the math? No. You fill in grids — demand, availability, rules — and read a schedule back. The mixed-integer programming stays under the hood; the samples show a complete working setup for six industries so you never start from a blank page.
What happens to my existing spreadsheet? It survives. Import your Excel to fill the form, export the solved schedule back to Excel. If your operation runs on a workbook today, it still can — the solver just takes over the part that hurt.
Who this fits
The sweet spot is a manager with roughly five to fifty people, real constraints (skills, availability, part-timers, coverage minimums), and no budget line for scheduling software. Restaurants and cafés, clinics, retail floors, small call centers, warehouses. If you’re scheduling three people who always work the same shifts, you don’t need optimization. If every week is a puzzle that eats your Sunday evening — that’s the case this was built for, and it’s free at staff-scheduling.kindoflost.com.
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