The free year, explained

Our trial is 365 days, free, for companies up to 50 employees. Not 14 days, not 30. A year. People assume this is a growth hack or a sign of desperation, and we would like to explain why it is neither. It is an admission about how HR software actually gets evaluated.

You cannot evaluate HR software in two weeks

A 14-day trial of HR software tests exactly one thing: whether you can import your employee list. Everything that matters happens on a longer clock.

Payroll proves itself monthly, and the interesting months are the irregular ones: the month with a mid-cycle exit, the month a salary revision lands retroactively, the month a statutory rate changes. Leave policies prove themselves across a year: carry-forward at year-end, the holiday list rollover, the December encashment questions. Tax proves itself across the full arc from April declarations to January proof collection to March Form 16. Appraisal cycles come once. If you have not run a year-end through a system, you do not know the system; you know its onboarding screens.

Every HR software buyer discovers this, usually in month seven of a paid contract, which is exactly when switching is most painful. The industry's standard trial length is not designed for the buyer to learn the truth. It is designed for the buyer to commit before the truth arrives.

So the trial is the cycle

We made the trial as long as the thing being evaluated: one full annual cycle. Run your real payroll on it for twelve months. Take your team through a holiday calendar, a leave year, a declaration and proof season, an appraisal. Then decide, with the evidence in hand, whether ₹10 to ₹30 per user per month is worth it. The pricing is flat and published, so there is no negotiation waiting to ambush you at conversion either.

The 50-employee cap is there because that is who this offer is honestly for: small companies making their first move off spreadsheets, or off software they resent. Larger companies have procurement processes, parallel runs and migration teams; they can and do evaluate differently.

What it costs us, plainly

A free year is not free for us. Serving a 40-person company for a year costs real money: infrastructure in Mumbai, support conversations, the payroll edge cases their first year will surface. And we are a recently launched product with no public customers to point at, so every one of these free years is funded by patience, ours and our parent company's. Teknowledge Software has been building software in Kolkata for over twenty years; a year is not a long time on that clock.

We can afford the patience for a second reason: our costs are low because the product is one system, not an acquisition-stitched suite, and our pricing is flat because our cost structure is boring. A trial this long would be reckless for a company burning venture money against a deadline. For us it is just a long sales cycle, honestly labelled.

Why it is worth it anyway

Here is the bet. A company that has run a full year on ZekoHR converts for the best possible reason: the software survived their real February. They are not converting because their data is held hostage or because the trial expired mid-payroll. Customers won that way stay, and they tell other people the story without being asked. That is the only marketing engine available to a product with no logos on its homepage, and we would rather build that engine slowly than fake a faster one.

There is also a discipline benefit for us, and it is uncomfortable in a useful way. When users can leave free for a year, the product has to earn every month. We cannot hide behind a contract. A trial that long is a standing dare to ourselves to be worth keeping, twelve separate times, before any money changes hands.

If you want to see whether we clear that bar, the why ZekoHR page says what we think we do differently, and the free year is how you check whether we are right. Bring your messiest payroll month. That is the one we want to be judged on.