AlpacaKeepIs it actually free, or a free trial in disguise?
Free here means free forever, up to 8 animals, no card, no countdown. You can stay on the free plan as long as you like.
Here is the trap you are right to watch for. A free trial is a test drive that ends. After 14 or 30 days the door locks and you either pay or lose access to your own records. Free forever is different: it is a small permanent plan you settle into and keep using, no expiry date attached.
Three things get called free, and they are not the same:
Free trial: full features, but a clock runs out and then you pay.
Freemium with a real free tier: a smaller plan that stays free, with an optional paid upgrade.
Free as a one-time download that is actually a trial in disguise: the classic old-desktop pattern.
AlpacaKeep is the middle one. There is a permanent free tier for up to 8 animals, plus an optional once-ever 30-day trial of a bigger plan if you ever want to test more room. The free tier does not depend on the trial. You only pay if your herd grows past the cap and you decide to upgrade.
What is the catch? How can free software make sense?
The free tier is real, and the model behind it is simple. Larger farms upgrade to paid plans, and that funds the free tier for everyone else. That is the whole arrangement.
No ads. We do not sell your data. There are no surprise add-ons and no setup fees.
It exists because we needed it ourselves. AlpacaKeep is built and run on a working alpaca farm in Val Gardena, South Tyrol. The people building it keep their own herd records in it, so the free plan is not a marketing hook bolted on at the end. It is the on-ramp we wanted for small and starter herds.
Free is not a loss-leader trick here. It is the front door.
What you can actually do on the free plan (and what is paid)
The limits up front, so there is nothing to discover later. The free plan covers up to 8 animals, multiple users, and 100 MB of storage, EU-hosted.
On the free plan you can:
Keep full herd records: each animal's profile, IDs, microchip, photos.
Track breeding and pedigree.
Log health and medication, including withdrawal-period tracking (how long after a treatment before milk or meat is safe to sell). A spreadsheet stores that date. The app works it out for you.
Keep fibre and shearing notes.
Set tasks and reminders.
Some features sit on the paid plans, and we would rather tell you now: CSV import, full financials, public sale pages, and the fibre analytics hub. See features for the full tour and pricing for where each line sits.
It is a modern web app. It runs in your browser on a phone, tablet or laptop. Nothing to install, and it updates itself. If you want the husbandry side of things, the care how-to lives in our alpaca care guide library. This page is about the software.
Will I outgrow the free tier and get held hostage?
8 animals stay free forever, and when you outgrow that the next step is a low fixed annual price, not a per-animal meter that climbs every time a cria is born. The full upgrade path is on pricing.
The escape hatch matters more, so we will say it plainly: you can export your data at any time, on every plan including the free one. Export is per-resource CSV (animals, events, financial entries) plus a full GDPR data download. Your records are yours, and you can leave with them.
Upgrading is a choice you make because the herd grew, not a wall that drops on day 30. There is no moment where you are locked out of work you have already done.
Is my data safe? (EU-hosted, GDPR, and you can export it)
Two different worries live inside that question: losing the data, and who controls it. Both have honest answers.
Losing it is the easy one. Everything is cloud-hosted with daily encrypted backups, so a dead laptop or a lost USB stick does not erase your herd history. That is the failure mode of old desktop software and loose spreadsheets, and it is the one we designed out first.
Who controls it deserves a straight answer rather than a slogan. Your records live on servers in the EU (Frankfurt), so EU privacy law and GDPR cover them, including your right to have your data erased. We will not tell you that EU hosting makes your data untouchable by any government. Our infrastructure providers are US-incorporated companies, so we keep the claim to what is true: EU data residency, EU jurisdiction for data at rest, daily encrypted backups, full GDPR including right-to-erasure, and the ability to export everything and walk away.
Do not take our adjectives for it. The export button is real, the region is named, and the law is public. Those are the things a careful buyer can check, which is rather the point.
Free software still has to keep you legal
Good news first: if your country expects you to keep certain records, a free tool should make that easier, not push you back to a paper folder.
The one rule we will state plainly, because it is cleanly settled: in the EU, if you keep a food-producing animal (and alpacas count when kept for fibre, meat or farming, unless your authority has formally excluded them), you must keep your veterinary medicine records for at least 5 years. That is Regulation (EU) 2019/6, Article 108, applicable since 28 January 2022. The UK mirrors it through the Veterinary Medicines Regulations 2013, also 5 years. The medication log with automatic withdrawal-period tracking was built for exactly this.
Beyond that one anchor, rules vary, so treat the lines below as pointers to check with your own authority, not as legal advice:
UK: camelids are not on the GOV.UK list of livestock that need a County Parish Holding (CPH) number, and you do not need a movement licence to keep alpacas on your own land for routine purposes. Whether a CPH applies to you is worth confirming with APHA or the RPA. Licences can apply in disease control zones, for export, or for TB.
Australia: a Property Identification Code (PIC) for the property is required, and movements are recorded with a waybill. NLIS tagging for alpacas is voluntary. Check your state or territory authority.
United States: there is no federal alpaca register. AOA pedigree registration is voluntary, and premises and movement rules vary by state. Check your state department of agriculture or USDA.
This is a record-keeping point, not a treatment plan. For when and what to actually administer, see our deworming schedule and vaccination schedule guides.
Last reviewed: June 2026. Confirm current rules with your own authority. Not legal advice.
Free alpaca software vs a spreadsheet (and old desktop tools)
A spreadsheet is free too, and for a handful of animals it can hold its own. What it cannot do is the thinking.
It will not calculate a due date for you. It will not warn you that an animal is still inside a withdrawal period and not yet clear to sell. It will not flag a risky grey-by-grey mating. It stores numbers. It does not act on them.
Old desktop software has a different problem. It is tied to one computer, there is no phone access in the barn, and when the machine dies the data usually dies with it.
Where they differ, in plain terms:
Calculates a breeding due date: app yes, spreadsheet no, desktop sometimes.
Warns you about a withdrawal period: app yes, spreadsheet no, desktop no.
Survives a dead laptop with automatic backups: app yes, spreadsheet no, desktop no.
Works on your phone in the field: app yes, spreadsheet awkwardly, desktop no.
Already keep your herd in a sheet? Moving it across is its own job, and we walk through it in switching from a spreadsheet. This page is about getting the free software in the first place.