Arcの代わり: what the free tier covers

Anyone shopping for Arcの代わり hits the same wall in the first hour. The thing being replaced was free, and most of the serious candidates are not, or are free only up to a line that is drawn in a different place by every vendor. One caps the number of apps. One caps how many copies of the same app can run. One gives everything away and charges nothing at all. Comparing the headline prices without understanding those caps produces a decision that falls apart in week two, when the tool turns out to be excellent and the free tier turns out to be one app short.

What follows is the published numbers, read off the vendors' own pricing pages, plus a method for deciding whether the paid tier is worth anything in a specific setup. Feature quality is not the subject here. This is about money.

The awkward part is that the old thing was free

The resistance to paying is rarely about the amount. It is about the baseline. Previous spending on a browser was zero, so any price at all is an increase, and an increase from zero reads as a change in kind rather than a change in degree.

A better comparison is what the same problem costs solved other ways. A second machine to keep accounts apart costs real money. Running two browsers and hunting for the right window costs no money and a few minutes every day. Doing nothing costs nothing visible and the most time of all. Ten minutes a day lost to switching is over 200 minutes a month, which is the number the annual price should be weighed against. Someone who runs that comparison and still finds the price high probably does fit inside a free tier, and that is a legitimate answer.

Published prices, side by side

All figures below appear on the vendors' own pricing pages and are quoted in US dollars. What lands on a card depends on the exchange rate at the time of payment, so no conversion is attempted here.

Product	Free plan	Paid plan	Team plan
Wavebox	Basic: 2 groups, 2 apps in each, 1 extension, one dashboard	Pro at 8.33 USD per month, paid annually	Teams at 12.50 USD per user per month
Shift	Free: 5 Spaces, 10 apps per Space, limited AI usage	Advanced at 199.99 USD annually	not listed
Rambox	Basic: unlimited apps, up to 2 instances per app	Pro at 7.00 USD per month, or 70.00 USD per year against a list price of 84 USD	Teams at 14 USD per user per month, from 5 users
Ferdium	Everything, free. Open source, built by the community	none	none

The paid tiers for individuals cluster between roughly 70 and 200 dollars a year. That is close to a 3x spread, which is wide enough that sorting by price is tempting and wrong. The cap structure in the next section moves the decision far more than the headline number does. For narrowing between two specific products, a direct pairing such as Compared with Rambox or Compared with Shift puts the conditions next to each other more usefully than a ranked list.

Free tiers are capped in three different ways

This is the part that decides the bill, and it is the part most comparison articles skip.

Capped by app count. Wavebox's free Basic plan allows 2 groups with 2 apps in each, so four apps in total. Shift's free plan allows 5 Spaces with 10 apps per Space, which places the ceiling much higher. Two products, same kind of cap, wildly different heights.

Capped by instances. Rambox's free Basic plan puts no limit on how many different apps get added, and draws the line at how many copies of one app can run at once: two on the free plan. A setup with ten different services and one account each never touches this cap. A setup with three Gmail accounts hits it immediately.

Capped by features. Extension count, cloud sync, number of dashboards, AI usage. The apps are not limited, the capabilities around them are.

Which ceiling gets hit first is a property of the setup, not the product. Someone with many services and one account each runs into app count limits. Someone with few services and several accounts each runs into instance limits. Counting both numbers before opening a pricing page turns a long comparison into a five minute one. Checking which services a candidate officially supports, using its list of supported apps, is worth doing in the same sitting, because an unsupported service usually gets added as a generic page with weaker notification handling.

Trials and refunds decide how much risk is real

The published trial terms matter more than they look, because switching tools always costs speed in the first few days.

All accounts start with a 7 day free trial of Wavebox Pro. After that you can stay on the free plan or subscribe to Wavebox Pro or Teams. No credit card is required to start the trial. Source: wavebox.io

Wavebox gives a 7 day Pro trial with no card required, and the same page states a 30 day money back guarantee. Rambox starts new accounts with a 30 day Pro trial, also without a card.

The length changes what a trial can actually measure. Muscle memory takes days to rebuild, so a short trial often ends while the tool still feels slower than the old setup, which is a verdict about unfamiliarity rather than about the product. With a month, the same evaluation happens after the adjustment is over. When a trial is short, the start date has to be chosen deliberately. A trial that begins the week of a deadline measures nothing.

Discounts that change the number

Two categories of buyer pay substantially less, and the terms are published rather than negotiated. Wavebox's pricing page offers 70% off for people in full time education or working in education, and the same 70% for non-profit teams. In both cases the stated process is to start the seven day trial using an education or .org address and then contact support to claim it.

At that level the annual cost drops well below the bottom of the range in the table. Students, teachers, school staff and non-profit employees should not rule a product out on list price alone. The conditions live on each vendor's pricing page, and reading the claim procedure takes a couple of minutes.

Monthly versus annual, and what happens with a team

For an individual, annual billing is cheaper per month. Rambox lists 7.00 USD monthly against 70.00 USD annually, where twelve monthly payments would total 84 USD, a difference of 14 dollars. Wavebox quotes its Pro figure as a monthly amount that assumes annual payment.

There is still a reason to take monthly billing for the first stretch. Whether a switching tool sticks is genuinely unknown at the point of purchase. If the trial ends and the decision is still uncertain, paying monthly for two months costs less than buying a year and abandoning it in March. Moving to annual billing once the habit has formed captures the discount without carrying the risk.

Team pricing changes the arithmetic again. Wavebox lists Teams at 12.50 USD per user per month. Rambox lists Teams at 14 USD per user per month with a minimum of five users, which is 70 dollars a month at that floor. Whether that beats buying individual plans for each person depends entirely on whether centralized billing, shared configuration and admin control are needed. If they are not, individual plans held by individual people work and usually cost less.

Staying on a free tier means choosing what earns a slot

A free plan with a ceiling of four apps is still usable, provided the four are chosen on the right criterion. The useful test is not how often an app gets opened. It is whether a notification needs to arrive without anyone looking.

Apps that push notifications earn a permanent slot, because nothing else will surface them. Apps that get opened deliberately do not, since a bookmark in an ordinary browser reaches them just as fast. Sorting that way usually leaves four to six candidates: mail, chat, calendar, a task tracker. Document stores, admin consoles and analytics dashboards fall off the list, and they are exactly the things people waste slots on.

Two accounts on one service consume two slots. Adding both a work inbox and a personal inbox uses half of a four slot ceiling before anything else is placed. Where the two genuinely never need to be visible at the same moment, leaving one of them in an ordinary browser is a reasonable trade. Deciding how the slots will be spent before reading a pricing page sometimes changes the conclusion about whether an upgrade is needed at all.

Two machines change the calculation

Anyone using both a home Mac and a work Mac should check how settings and app layout are kept in step across them. Some products include that sync on the free plan, others treat it as a paid capability. For a single machine setup the difference is invisible. For a two machine setup it is frequently the thing that forces an upgrade.

The other question is whether a license attaches to a person or to a device. Individual plans are usually priced per user, in which case a second machine adds nothing. Confirming the wording on the pricing page before purchase avoids an unpleasant surprise at the point where the second install asks for payment.

The zero cost route, and what it costs instead

Two routes keep spending at nothing. The first is living inside a free tier. The second is using an openly licensed product. Ferdium publishes everything for free, states that it can be used without creating an account at all, and offers optional cloud sync for people who do create one.

The trade is not hidden, it is just paid in a different currency. With community built software, how quickly a defect gets fixed depends on who is available and interested. A problem gets reported in public and then waits. Part of what a subscription buys is not features at all, it is a support obligation and someone whose job is to answer.

The decision comes down to what happens when the tool stops working mid morning. If the answer is that the afternoon is still fine, a free route is sufficient. If the answer is that revenue stops, roughly 100 dollars a year is cheap insurance and the debate is over.

A way to test whether the paid tier is worth it

Subjective impressions are a bad basis for a recurring charge, so replace them with a count. Run the free tier for two weeks and tally every time the cap gets in the way: an app that could not be added, a second account that would not stay signed in, an extension that could not be enabled.

Zero hits means the paid tier is buying nothing today. Several hits a week means the tool fits the way the work actually happens and only the ceiling is in the way, which is exactly when paying is rational. The count also protects against the opposite error, which is upgrading because a feature list looked impressive rather than because anything was blocked.

One discipline makes the count meaningful: run one candidate at a time, until its cap is reached. Installing two at once makes it impossible to attribute any friction to either, and the usual outcome is two subscriptions and one abandoned tool.

What to change first

Count daily apps and accounts per service before opening any pricing page, because those two numbers determine which cap binds and therefore which product is cheapest for this specific setup. Then run one free tier for two weeks and tally the blocks rather than trusting an impression. If the tally says the ceiling is the only obstacle, compare the paid options against what is offered by SpaceDeck and pick on cap structure, not on headline price.