If you are selling on one or two marketplaces and processing under 50 orders a month, Zoho Inventory's free plan genuinely covers stock and order tracking at no cost. Veeqo's free plan covers unlimited shipping but not automated inventory sync, which sits on its paid Inventory tier from £17 a month. Neither free tier is a reason to buy Cin7 Core, which starts at $349 a month, before you outgrow them.
Key pointers
- Zoho Inventory's free plan caps out at 50 orders a month, one user and two locations. That is roughly 1 to 2 orders a day.
- Veeqo's free "Shipping" plan is unlimited on orders, users and SKUs, but it does not include automated inventory sync. That needs the paid Inventory plan, from £17 a month including VAT.
- If you sell on Amazon, Veeqo's shipping tools and Amazon account-health features are the strongest free-tier fit, because Amazon owns Veeqo.
- If you sell mainly on eBay, Etsy or your own store, Zoho Inventory's free plan is the more useful starting point because it tracks stock, not just shipping.
- Cin7 Core has no permanently free tier, only a 14-day self-serve free trial. Its cheapest paid plan is $349 a month for 5 users and 6,000 orders a year, before tax.
- Do not jump to Cin7 Core to solve a problem a £17 to £25 a month upgrade on your current platform would fix.
- Both Zoho and Veeqo publish add-on and next-tier pricing openly. Check the exact order cap you would hit before you commit to either free tier.
What a very small seller actually needs
A retailer just starting to sell on Amazon or eBay usually needs three things from inventory software: a single place that shows what stock you have left, orders that do not oversell across channels, and something that does not cost more than the margin on the products themselves. Neither Zoho Inventory nor Veeqo were built to be permanently free at scale. Both companies expect you to move to a paid tier once your order volume makes the free plan a genuine constraint rather than an inconvenience.
The two free tiers solve different problems. Zoho Inventory's free plan is a real, if small, stock and order management tool: it tracks quantities across two locations, supports composite items, dropshipment and backordering, and connects to marketplaces including Amazon, with a UK product edition and UK-specific features such as inbound Amazon shipments built in (Zoho). Its constraint is the 50-orders-a-month cap and the single user.
Veeqo's free plan is shipping software, not stock software. It gives unlimited orders, users, products and warehouses for printing labels and buying discounted carrier rates from Amazon Shipping, Royal Mail, Evri, DPD and FedEx. Automated inventory sync across channels, demand forecasting and unlimited multichannel listings only arrive on the paid Inventory plan, priced by monthly order volume from £17 a month including VAT (Veeqo). A seller on Veeqo's free plan alone is still updating stock levels by hand or trusting each marketplace's own count.
Where the free tier actually runs out
For Zoho Inventory, the limit is explicit and easy to plan around: 50 orders a month, one user, two locations. Zoho does not publish exactly what happens the moment you exceed 50 orders in a month on the free plan; budget for the Standard tier, at £25 a month for 500 orders, 2 users and 2 locations, once you are consistently close to the ceiling, rather than assuming the free plan will simply let you carry on. Once you have upgraded to a paid plan, Zoho's own pricing calculator lets you add orders in blocks of 500 for £6 a month rather than jumping a whole tier again, which is useful if you are close to a paid plan's cap but not ready for the next one up (Zoho); this add-on is not available while you are still on the free plan.
For Veeqo, the order count is not the constraint on the free plan, because shipping is unlimited. The constraint is functional: the moment you want stock levels to update automatically when a sale happens on Amazon, eBay or Shopify, without you checking each channel by hand, you need the Inventory plan. Veeqo prices that by monthly order volume rather than a flat fee, starting at £17 a month for up to 300 orders and rising in bands to £1,142-plus a month for 50,000 to 100,000 orders (Veeqo).
Pricing and cost model
All three platforms charge monthly, with no setup fee published for any of them. Zoho Inventory and Veeqo both publish native GBP pricing for UK sellers; Cin7 Core prices in US dollars only, with no GBP list price and no free tier at all. Converting Cin7 Core's cheapest plan at the 29 September 2026 reference rate of $1 = £0.7549 (Frankfurter.app, which republishes European Central Bank daily rates) puts its Standard plan at roughly £263 a month, excluding tax, for 5 users and 6,000 orders a year. That is an estimate for comparison, not Cin7's UK invoice price, since Cin7 does not itself quote in pounds.
Tax treatment differs too. Zoho's prices are stated as exclusive of local taxes, Veeqo's are stated as including VAT, and Cin7's are stated as excluding tax. Check which figure you are being shown before you compare like for like, and add VAT to Zoho's and Cin7's headline numbers when budgeting a UK invoice.
When Cin7 Core actually becomes the right answer
Cin7 Core is not a free-tier competitor at all: it has no permanently free plan, only a 14-day self-serve trial that requires a paid subscription afterwards, and its cheapest plan is priced for 5 users and 6,000 orders a year. That is roughly 500 orders a month, ten times Zoho's free-plan cap, for a monthly cost that would run to hundreds of pounds. It only makes sense once you have manufacturing, purchasing, or multi-location stock complexity that a £17 to £65 a month plan on Zoho or Veeqo genuinely cannot handle, not simply because you have outgrown a free tier by a small margin.
Vendor and option comparison
| Zoho Inventory (Free) | Zoho Inventory (Standard) | Veeqo (Shipping, free) | Veeqo (Inventory, from) | Cin7 Core (Standard) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | £0 | £25, billed annually, excl. tax | £0 | From £17, incl. VAT | $349 (about £263), excl. tax |
| Order allowance | 50 a month | 500 a month | Unlimited | From up to 300 a month | 6,000 a year (about 500 a month) |
| Users | 1 | 2 | Unlimited | Unlimited | 5 |
| Automated stock sync | Yes, within the cap | Yes | No, shipping only | Yes | Yes |
| Best fit | Testing the platform, pre-launch, very low volume | Steady small seller past 50 orders/month | Amazon-first sellers who mainly need shipping labels | Amazon-first sellers needing real inventory sync | Multi-location, manufacturing or purchasing-heavy operations |
Questions to ask before you pay for anything
- How close are you, in a typical month, to Zoho's 50-order cap or the order band your Veeqo Inventory quote is based on? If you are nowhere near it, stay free for now.
- Do you actually need automated stock sync yet, or can you check stock across one or two marketplaces by hand for a few more weeks? If you can, Veeqo's free Shipping plan alone may be enough.
- Are you selling mainly through Amazon, where Veeqo's carrier rates and account-health tools add value beyond inventory, or through eBay, Etsy or your own store, where Zoho Inventory's broader stock features matter more?
- If you upgrade to a paid Zoho tier, would its £6-a-month order add-on tide you over next time, rather than a full tier jump?
- Does your business genuinely need manufacturing, purchasing workflows or multi-warehouse stock control, which is what Cin7 Core is built for and what its $349-a-month entry price reflects?
Editorial analysis
The most common mistake a very small seller makes here is skipping a step: reading about Cin7 Core because it appears in every "best inventory software" list, without first checking whether Zoho Inventory's free 50-order plan or Veeqo's free shipping plan already covers what the business does today. Both Zoho and Veeqo are transparent about where their free tiers stop, which makes it straightforward to work out, from your own order count, whether an upgrade of £17 to £25 a month is due, long before a £263-a-month platform aimed at 500 orders a month and multi-location stock control is relevant.
