Ask "is it free?" about any popular software tool and you will get four different kinds of yes. Some tools are free because the licence says anyone may use and modify the code. Some are free because the vendor gives away a capped plan to sell you a bigger one. Some are free only for 14 days. And some are free to download but expensive to actually run.
This page answers the question for the specific tools Indian buyers and developers search for most, using each vendor's own pricing or licence page, read on 23 September 2026. Prices are quoted in the currency the vendor publishes.
The four models, and why the difference matters
1. Open source
The licence grants you the right to use, modify and redistribute the software at no charge. There is no vendor plan to outgrow. What you still pay for is infrastructure, engineering time and, if you want it, a support contract. PostgreSQL, Playwright, Argo CD and LibreOffice sit here.
2. Freemium
A permanent free plan with hard caps, designed as the entry point to a paid plan. It does not expire. Milanote and Zoho Meeting work this way. The question to ask is not "is it free" but "what is the cap, and how fast will my team hit it".
3. Free tier on a usage meter
Common in developer tooling. You get a monthly allowance of API calls, builds or minutes; past that you pay per unit. Composio is a clean example. The risk is not the price, it is the bill shape: check whether the free plan is hard-capped or whether it silently meters into overage.
4. Free trial
Full product, fixed window, then it stops. This is the model most often mislabelled "free" in comparison articles. Most business suites in office software and payment categories use some version of it for the premium tiers.
A fifth case deserves its own name: open source, paid to host. The code is free; the managed service is not. Argo CD, Grafana, GitLab, ERPNext and Odoo all have a free self-hosted path and a commercial hosted or enterprise edition alongside it.
The honest answer for the tools people actually search
| Tool | Genuinely free? | What the vendor publishes |
|---|---|---|
| Milanote | Freemium | Free plan with no time limit: 100 notes, images or links, 10 file uploads, unlimited shared boards. Paid: $9.99/month billed annually, or $12.50 billed monthly. Team plan $49/month billed annually. |
| Argo CD | Open source | Released under the Apache License 2.0 by the argoproj project. Free to run; you pay for the Kubernetes cluster it runs on and for any third-party managed Argo service. |
| Composio | Free tier, hard-capped | Free plan is $0, no credit card: 100,000 tool calls and 50,000 triggers a month, 3 team members. Usage pauses at the cap. Scale is $29/month and includes $29 of monthly usage credit, which does not roll over. |
| Microsoft Lens | Was free — now retiring | Microsoft's support page states the Lens app is being retired from iOS and Android starting 9 January 2026, unsupported after 9 February, with scanning available until 9 March 2026. |
| Playwright | Open source | Apache License 2.0. No paid edition from Microsoft; cost appears only if you run it on someone else's CI or grid. |
| MySQL | Open source (Community) | The LICENSE shipped with MySQL Community is GPLv2 with additional permissions. Oracle also sells commercially licensed editions; we could not fetch Oracle's pricing pages, which blocked automated requests. |
| PostgreSQL | Open source | The PostgreSQL License, described by the project as a liberal open source licence similar to BSD or MIT, with no plans to change it. No commercial edition exists from a single owner. |
| Zoho Meeting | Freemium | A Free plan listed alongside paid tiers: up to 100 participants per meeting, up to 60 minutes per meeting, screen sharing, whiteboard, basic reports. Paid plans add cloud recording storage of 5 GB per host and meetings up to 24 hours. Paid tiers start with a 14-day trial, no credit card. |
| Razorpay | Free to integrate, per-transaction fee | The pricing page states 2% + GST per successful payment, zero setup fees and zero Annual Maintenance Charges, strictly pay-as-you-go. |
| LibreOffice | Open source | Made available under the Mozilla Public License v2.0, based on code from Apache OpenOffice under Apache 2.0. |
| Microsoft 365 for the web | Free tier | Microsoft's India page offers free web versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint with a Microsoft account, plus 5 GB of OneDrive storage. Desktop apps remain paid. |
Reading the fine print: three traps
"Free forever" with a seat cap. A free plan for 3 users is a pricing decision disguised as generosity. Composio's free plan includes 3 team members; Milanote's free plan is per person. Model the cost at the team size you will have in a year, not today.
Free to download, paid to operate. Self-hosting ERPNext or Argo CD removes the licence fee and adds a server, backups, upgrades and someone's time. For a five-person business that trade is usually bad. For a fifty-person engineering team with existing infrastructure it is usually good. Browse DevOps tools with that distinction in mind rather than filtering on price alone.
Free but being retired. Microsoft Lens is the cautionary example: a genuinely free, widely used scanning app with a published end date. Free software can be withdrawn at no notice to you, because you are not a paying customer with a contract. Keep an export path for anything free that holds your data.
What "free alternative" usually means
Searches for a free alternative to a paid tool generally land in one of three places:
- An open-source equivalent you host. LibreOffice or ONLYOFFICE in place of a paid office suite; PostgreSQL or MySQL in place of a licensed database.
- A free tier of a commercial competitor. Zoho Meeting's free plan against a paid conferencing tool is a like-for-like swap within video conferencing — the trade is the 60-minute and 100-participant caps.
- A smaller tool that does one job. Instead of replacing a full suite, replace the one feature you use. Milanote's free plan is enough for a moodboard, not for a company wiki; see other options in note taking.
"Is it free and legit" is a fair question to ask of any tool promising something expensive for nothing. The test is simple: can you find the free plan, its limits and its licence on the vendor's own domain? If the only source for a price is a comparison blog, treat the number as unverified.
FAQ
Is Milanote free?
Yes, Milanote has a free plan with no time limit, capped at 100 notes, images or links and 10 file uploads, with unlimited shared boards. Beyond that the paid plan is $9.99 per month billed annually, or $12.50 billed monthly, and a team plan is $49 per month billed annually.
Is Argo CD free?
Yes. Argo CD is open source under the Apache License 2.0, so the software itself costs nothing and there is no seat licence. You still pay to run the Kubernetes cluster it sits on, and managed Argo CD services from third-party vendors are commercial products priced separately.
Is Composio free?
Composio has a free plan at $0 with no credit card: 100,000 tool calls, 50,000 triggers and 3 team members per month, hard-capped so usage pauses rather than billing you. The Scale plan is $29 a month and includes $29 of usage credit that expires each billing month.
Is Microsoft Lens free?
Microsoft Lens was free, but Microsoft's own support page says the app is being retired from iOS and Android starting 9 January 2026, with support ending 9 February 2026 and scanning available until 9 March 2026. Existing scans remain accessible if the app stays installed, so plan an export.
Are MySQL and PostgreSQL free?
Both are free as software. PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL License, which the project describes as a liberal open source licence with no plans to change it. MySQL Community is released under GPLv2 with additional permissions; Oracle separately sells commercially licensed editions.
Is Razorpay free for developers?
There is no licence or subscription fee. Razorpay's pricing page states 2% + GST on successful payments, with zero setup fees and zero Annual Maintenance Charges on a pay-as-you-go basis, so integration and testing cost nothing and you pay only when money moves.
Free Microsoft 365 vs LibreOffice: which is actually free?
Both, differently. Microsoft offers Word, Excel and PowerPoint free in the browser with a Microsoft account and 5 GB of OneDrive storage, but the desktop apps are paid. LibreOffice is free desktop software under the Mozilla Public License v2.0, with no account and no upsell, but no vendor-run cloud behind it.
Sources
Every figure above comes from the vendor's own site, read on 23 September 2026. Oracle's mysql.com pages returned HTTP 403 to our requests, so the MySQL licence statement is taken from the LICENSE file in Oracle's own mysql-server repository instead.
