Scheduling apps bundle several jobs: building the week, telling staff, trading shifts, clocking in and paying. If what hurts on Sunday night is the first one, you do not need all of them. This page says plainly which part the free roster builder covers and which it does not.
| The job | Where to do it |
|---|---|
| Fill a week of shifts from staff availability, hour limits and wages, with no one in overtime who need not be | This tool. Paste or upload the staff list, get a roster, a list of shifts nobody could take and why, and who the week depends on. |
| Tell staff their shifts | This tool: a calendar file per person, a text to paste, and an optional self-hosted team page (below). |
| Staff swap shifts and ask for time off | The self-hosted team page handles requests and the manager approves; swaps are checked against rest and hour rules. |
| Clock in and out, geofencing, payroll export | A scheduling suite. This tool has none of it. |
| Push notifications and a mobile staff app | A scheduling suite. The team page is a web link, not a notifying app. |
| Integrations with your point-of-sale or payroll | A scheduling suite. This tool exports CSV and calendar files only. |
It runs in your browser, so your staff list and their wages are never uploaded and nobody makes an account. It treats availability, rest gaps, weekly and daily limits, minors' hours, split-shift premiums and overtime as rules, searches for the cheapest roster that covers the most hours, and tells you before the week starts which shifts cannot be filled and what blocks each one. The source is MIT-licensed, so a small team can also run its own copy of the team page without a per-user price.
Try it without typing: pick a template (cafe, salon, shop, clinic) and it builds a roster for an invented team straight away.
For the rota-building part, yes: the free roster builder fills as many shifts as your rules allow, names the ones nobody can take, and runs in your browser with no account. It does not replace time clocks, payroll, push notifications or a staff app. Teams that need those still need a scheduling suite.
Yes. The roster builder repository includes a small self-hosted server: you publish the week, your team opens one link to see their shifts and add them to a calendar, and it sends you their availability and shift-trade requests. It is MIT-licensed, has no dependencies and runs on a disk you own.
It checks availability, rest gaps, hour limits and overtime for you, searches for the cheapest roster that still covers the most shift-hours, and tells you which shifts cannot be filled and why before the week starts.