When I Work costs $2.50/user/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $1,800 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$2.50/user/mo is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Shiftly: the pay-once alternative
Shiftly does the same core job for $29, once. Self-hosted drag-drop scheduling, swaps, open shifts and live labor cost — no per-employee fees.
| Shiftly | When I Work | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $29 once | $2.50/user/mo |
| 20 employees, 1 year | $29 | $600 |
| Drag-drop schedule | Yes | Yes |
| Availability + time off | Yes | Yes |
| Shift swaps + open shifts | Yes | Yes |
| Labor cost + budget alert | Yes | Paid tier |
| Self-hosted, data stays yours | Yes | No |
| Works offline / on your LAN | Yes | No |
One month of scheduling one small team more than pays for Shiftly, and it never bills per head again.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need When I Work's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Shiftly is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Shiftly — $29, once
Self-hosted drag-drop scheduling, swaps, open shifts and live labor cost — no per-employee fees.