TuitionDesk Free Plan Explained: 10 Students, Free Forever, No Card

Most "free plan" software in this category means a 14- or 30-day trial with a credit card held hostage until you cancel. TuitionDesk's Free plan has no expiry, no credit card, and no trial clock — it's a real, permanently usable plan capped by size, not by time. Here's exactly what that cap is, what it includes, and where the line actually gets drawn.

The number: 10 students, 1 teacher

TuitionDesk Free supports up to 10 students and 1 teacher, and both caps are hard — meaning the 11th student or 2nd teacher simply can't be added until you upgrade, rather than the app silently letting you over the line and surprising you with a bill later.

Limit	Free plan	What happens at the cap
Students	10 (hard cap)	Add-student form blocks the 11th with a clear "upgrade to add more" message — nothing breaks, nothing is deleted
Teachers	1 (hard cap)	Owner can still teach and manage; a 2nd teacher login needs Starter+
Branches	1	Single-location only
Counsellors	1	One admissions/front-desk login beyond the owner
Batches	Unlimited	No cap on how many batches your 10 students are split across
Storage	20 MB	Logo, QR codes, documents, and profile photos combined

A solo tutor running 8–10 students from home never needs to touch a paid plan. That's deliberate — Free is not a lead magnet that expires in a month, it's a real tier for a real business size.

What you actually get on Free — not a stripped demo

This is the part most "free plans" get wrong: they give you a crippled preview so you're forced to upgrade to see if the product even works. TuitionDesk Free runs the same core loop as every paid plan:

Fee plans, auto fee generation, and fee alerts — not a manual fee log, the same fee engine every tier uses
Attendance and session scheduling for your batches
Teacher Portal — a teacher gets their own login to mark attendance and see their classes (yes, on Free)
Parent Portal — parents self-serve fees, attendance, and updates instead of calling you
WhatsApp notifications for fee reminders and other enabled events (once you enable them in Settings; WhatsApp credits apply on every plan, including Free)
Email notifications — unlimited and free on every plan, no exceptions
Public academy site — a page prospective parents can find and enquire through
Enquiry management and admissions — capture enquiries from your public site, track them, and convert a lead straight into a student record, on Free too
Student profiles, custom student IDs, and profile photos

Teacher Portal, Parent Portal, and basic enquiry/admissions management are all available on every plan, including Free. TuitionDesk doesn't gate the things that stop parents from calling you, stop teachers from needing the owner's own login, or stop a lead from falling through the cracks before it's even a student — those are table stakes, not an upsell.

What's not on Free (and why)

Full Admissions CRM pipeline — advanced multi-stage tracking and analytics on top of the basic enquiry-to-student flow already included on Free (Pro+)
Auto fee schedules and CSV import/export (Starter+)
PDF receipts and invoices (Growth+)
Homework, assessments, session notes, online payments (Pro+)
AI Operations — auto-substitution, dropout prediction, morning briefings (Enterprise)

None of these are things a 10-student solo tutor typically needs on day one. They're the features that matter once you're juggling more students than you can track in your head, or more than one person needs to log in.

Why hard caps, not a soft nag

A soft limit — "you can keep adding students, we'll just remind you to upgrade" — sounds friendlier, but it means the Free plan quietly becomes whatever size you grow it to, and the business model stops meaning anything. A hard cap means the number on this page is the number that's actually true in the product, every time, for every centre. If you're at 9 students, you can see exactly how much room is left before the next class enrols; you're never guessing whether "up to 10" is a suggestion.

The real alternative isn't another SaaS — it's a notebook

The centres who'd otherwise be on Free are mostly running fees out of a physical register, a WhatsApp group for parent updates, and a memory of who paid this month. That works until a parent disputes a payment, or a second person needs to help and doesn't know which students are current. Free plan TuitionDesk replaces that stack for zero rupees — the switch cost is an afternoon of adding 10 students, not a monthly bill.

Compared with other coaching-software vendors in India, most don't offer a permanent free tier at all — see our Classplus and full 2026 comparison breakdowns — typically a 14–30 day trial, after which entry pricing runs ₹1,000–₹5,000+/month for a comparable feature set. TuitionDesk's Starter plan, by contrast, starts at ₹499/month once you outgrow Free.

When to upgrade — and what actually triggers it

Nobody should upgrade because a plan page told them to. Upgrade when one of these becomes true:

Your 11th student enrols. The add-student form will tell you plainly — this isn't a surprise invoice, it's a blocked action with an upgrade link right there.
You hire a second teacher and don't want to share your own owner login and password with them.
You want auto-generated fee schedules instead of creating each month's fee entry by hand.

Free never expires on its own. If 10 students genuinely covers your business, there's no reason to move — TuitionDesk doesn't put a countdown on the plan to force a decision you don't need to make yet.

Real example

Anjali tutors 9 students in two batches from her apartment in Pune. She's on Free — fee reminders go out automatically, and both sets of parents check the portal instead of texting her every Sunday asking "did fees go through?" When a 10th student's parent enquires next month, she'll be at the cap; when an 11th does, that's her signal to move to Starter, not before.

Getting started

Register on TuitionDesk — no credit card required
Add up to 10 students and create your first batch
Turn on WhatsApp notifications in Settings if you want fee reminders to go out automatically
Invite your first parent to the Parent Portal and stop being the only source of "did class happen today?"

Bottom line

TuitionDesk's Free plan is a real, permanent tier for centres at 10 students and 1 teacher — not a trial with a clock on it. You get the same fee engine, attendance system, Teacher Portal, and Parent Portal as every paid tier, capped by size so the number on this page is always the true number. See the full plan breakdown for what Starter, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise add on top.

Start free — 10 students, no credit card, no expiry →