Freeish vs a shared spreadsheet
A Google Sheet or Excel file the family shares, with a tab per person or a grid per month. Common in organised households and among carers sharing cover.
What a shared spreadsheet does well
- Infinitely flexible — you can model any rota shape you like.
- Free, and everybody can already open one.
- Several people can edit at once, with a history of who changed what.
- Excellent for a care rota where several people take turns.
- Prints well, which matters more than it sounds.
Choose a shared spreadsheet if…
If you are coordinating cover between several people — siblings sharing care for a parent, say — and you want to model it exactly your way, a shared spreadsheet is hard to beat and costs nothing. Freeish is more opinionated and less flexible by design.
Choose Freeish if…
Choose Freeish when the maintenance is the problem. A spreadsheet has to be updated by hand every time anything changes, nobody is told when it does, and there is no privacy — the person who set it up ends up owning it forever.
Side by side
| a shared spreadsheet | Freeish | |
|---|---|---|
| Flexibility | Total. Model anything. | Opinionated: shifts, visibility, people. |
| Keeping it up to date | Manual, every time. | Photo import; rotations generate themselves. |
| Knowing something changed | Nobody is told. | Followers see it immediately. |
| On a phone | Workable, not pleasant. | Built for it. |
| Privacy | Everyone with the link sees everything. | Per event. |
| Cost | Free. | Free to start. |
Questions people actually ask
We use a spreadsheet for a care rota. Should we switch?
Can I import a spreadsheet?
Why is Freeish less flexible on purpose?
Try it against whatever you use now.
Now on iPhone — Android coming soon. Free to start, and nothing to migrate — import one week from a photo and see whether it sticks.