Free building maintenance software is a real option and it is worth saying so on a site that sells a subscription. A plant register of thirty or forty assets, a schedule against them, and a list of open faults can be kept for nothing by one organised person, and quite a lot of buildings are run exactly that way without anything going wrong. What free does not survive is a second person needing to answer what is overdue, because at that point the register stops being a record and becomes a dependency on whoever maintains it. This page is about where that line falls and how to see it coming.
What free genuinely covers
A list of plant with make, model and location. A recurring schedule against each item. A running list of reported faults. All three fit in a spreadsheet, all three are maintained more reliably by one person who cares than by a system nobody was trained on, and none of it costs anything.
Read the per-user line before the feature list
Most free tiers in this category are free for one user and priced from the second. That is not a free plan, it is a trial with a longer clock, and it is the line to check first because the second user is exactly the point at which you needed the software.
The failure is silent and specific
It is not that the spreadsheet becomes wrong. It is the week its author is on leave and nobody can say what the chiller is due for. Nothing goes red, nothing is flagged, and the deferral only becomes visible as a breakdown later.
Price the gap before crossing it
On the worked example this site publishes, 84 breakdowns a month at 2.3 hours more than the planned version is $9,273.60 in avoidable labour. Any subscription is small or large against your own version of that figure, and until you have it you are comparing prices rather than value.
Questions people ask about free building maintenance software
Is free preventive maintenance software any good?
For a small register with one keeper, genuinely yes. This site would rather say that than sell a subscription somebody does not need.
What is usually the first paid feature?
Users, then mobile, then history retention. Check how long a free tier keeps closed work orders: history that expires is the one thing you cannot rebuild.
Can we export from a free tier later?
Ask before you start, not after. A free tier with no export is where two years of history goes to be stranded.