Free POS Software in Bangladesh: What You Get, What You Give Up

Type "free POS software Bangladesh" into Google and you get two kinds of results: vendors who use the word "free" to mean a trial, and forum threads where someone recommends an open-source package they set up once for a friend. Neither tells you what a free POS will actually do on a counter in Mirpur at 8pm on a Thursday, or what it will quietly cost you by this time next year.

We sell a paid POS, so read this with that in mind. But we are also built on ERPNext, an open-source system you could download and run yourself for nothing, so we have no interest in pretending free does not work. It often does. This article lays out the five free routes Bangladeshi shops actually take, what each one leaves out, the costs that do not show up on the price tag, and a 12-month comparison against our cheapest paid plan so you can decide with numbers instead of slogans.

The five ways shops in Bangladesh run a POS for free

Each of these is a real option with real users. None is a trick.

1. A vendor's free plan (Nexchar and similar)

Nexchar publishes a free starter plan: an Android app that bills from a phone or tablet, pairs with a Bluetooth receipt printer, keeps a product list and stock count, and states an offline mode. It is the lowest-barrier POS in the country, because the hardware you already own is enough. As of August 2026 the paid tiers are not priced on the site, so you will find out what the upgrade costs when you need it. Other local vendors offer free trials of 7 to 30 days, which are useful for evaluation but are not a free plan.

2. Odoo, one app free

Odoo's "One App Free" plan lets you run a single Odoo application at no licence cost, for unlimited users, on Odoo's cloud. If that one app is Point of Sale, you get a capable till with offline billing and a product catalogue. The moment you add a second app, say Inventory or Accounting, the whole installation moves to a paid per-user plan billed in US dollars, and Bangladesh-specific VAT and bKash need a local partner or your own developer to build and maintain.

3. Self-hosted ERPNext

ERPNext is a full open-source ERP, licensed under GPL, with a POS module, inventory, purchasing, accounting, HR and more. You can install it on your own server or a rented cloud machine and pay nothing for the software, ever, for any number of users and outlets. This is the stack MondayPOS is built on, so we will be specific about it further down: the software is free, the skills and the hours to run it are not.

4. Excel or Google Sheets

A shared sheet with columns for date, item, quantity, price and payment method, and a second sheet for stock. Free, familiar, and it works until the first day two people need to edit it at once, or the first time someone sorts a column without selecting the others.

5. The Facebook page and the notebook

The most common "POS" in Bangladesh by far. Orders arrive in Messenger or WhatsApp, sales go in a khata, dues go in a second khata, and the owner reconciles in their head. Zero software cost and a very high cost in owner attention, which is the one resource a small shop never has enough of.

What free tiers typically leave out

The gaps are remarkably consistent across the free options. This is what you should expect to be missing, and what to check before relying on any of them.

Sources: vendor websites and documentation as of August 2026. "Usually" and "rare" reflect what is published; ask the vendor to confirm for your case.

Three of those rows matter far more than the others for a Bangladeshi shop.

Mushak 6.3. If you are VAT-registered, a till that prints a "tax" line is not a till that prints a Mushak 6.3. The invoice layout, the serial control and the monthly registers are specific, and your VAT consultant will reject anything else. No free tier we reviewed ships a Bangladesh Mushak 6.3 out of the box. If you are not VAT-registered, this row does not apply to you yet, which is one of the strongest arguments for free (see the last section). Our Mushak 6.3 guide covers what the forms require.

Support. When a paid POS stops printing at 7pm on Chand Raat, you phone someone. When a free one stops, you search a forum. The difference is not the software, it is who owns the problem.

Backups. A vendor free plan on the vendor's cloud is probably backed up, but read the terms: free tiers often carry shorter retention and no recovery guarantee. Self-hosted and spreadsheet setups are backed up exactly as often as you remember to do it.

The hidden costs of a free POS

"Free" describes the licence. These are the other lines on the bill.

Hosting

Self-hosted ERPNext or a self-managed Odoo needs a server. A modest cloud VPS that will comfortably run a single-outlet ERPNext instance typically costs ৳1,200–3,500 per month from international providers, plus a domain and SSL. A local server in the shop avoids the monthly fee but adds a one-time machine purchase, a UPS, and a person who knows what to do when it does not boot after a power cut.

A developer, or your own evenings

ERPNext is a general-purpose ERP. Turning it into a Bangladesh retail POS means configuring the chart of accounts for VAT, building a Mushak 6.3 print format, setting up bKash and Nagad as modes of payment, defining item groups, barcode fields and price lists, importing your product list, and then applying security updates every few weeks. A freelance ERPNext developer in Dhaka typically charges ৳25,000–80,000 for an initial single-outlet setup and ৳3,000–10,000 per month for ongoing maintenance, depending on scope. The alternative is doing it yourself, which is realistic if you enjoy it and have the evenings, and unrealistic if you are also the cashier, the buyer and the delivery person.

Data loss

This is the cost nobody budgets for, because it is zero right up until it is everything. A phone that gets stolen with the only copy of three months of sales on it. A spreadsheet someone "cleaned up". A VPS that lapsed because the card expired. We will not invent a figure for what that costs you; think about what one month of your sales and dues ledger is worth, and what you would pay to get it back.

Time at the counter

A phone POS with a small screen and a Bluetooth printer that needs re-pairing every morning is slower per bill than a terminal with a scanner and a thermal printer. At 30 bills a day the difference is nothing. At 300, it is a queue, and a queue in a Gulshan supershop is lost sales.

The upgrade cliff

Free plans are priced to get you in. The day you open a second outlet or need a feature behind the paywall, you discover the real price, and by then your data and habits are inside the system. That is not dishonest on the vendor's part, but you should know the paid price before you commit, not after.

Total cost over 12 months: free vs Lite

Here is a plain comparison for a single small shop over its first year. The free columns assume you are disciplined about backups and do not lose data. MondayPOS Lite is ৳1,500 per outlet per month, billed yearly, with data migration included and a 14-day refund window. Hardware is excluded throughout because it is the same question whichever software you choose; our POS price guide covers it.

All ranges are typical as of August 2026 and should be checked against current quotes.

Two honest readings of that table. First, a vendor free plan genuinely costs nothing in cash, and for a shop that is not VAT-registered and has one counter, it may be all you need. Second, self-hosted ERPNext with a developer is not the cheap option; it is the flexible option, and it usually costs more in year one than a small-shop subscription. Where self-hosting wins is at scale or for unusual requirements, when you have an IT person already on payroll and the per-outlet subscription on a ten-branch chain adds up.

The ERPNext angle, since we are built on it

MondayPOS runs on ERPNext and Frappe, which are open source. That means two things you should know before buying from us or anyone else.

You could self-host the same foundation. Nothing stops a shop with the skills from downloading ERPNext, configuring it for Bangladesh and running it for free. We have done the Bangladesh configuration, the Mushak 6.3 formats, the bKash and Nagad tender types, the offline-first terminal, the batch and expiry handling for pharmacies, the hosting, the backups and the phone support, and we charge for that work. If you would rather do it yourself, the software is there and we will not think less of you.

Your data is not locked in a proprietary format. Because the underlying system is open, your items, customers, invoices and ledger sit in a standard database and export cleanly. That is the answer to the "how do I get my data out" demo question, and it is a reasonable thing to ask any free or paid vendor.

When free is the right answer

We would tell a shop owner to start with a free POS in these situations, without hesitation.

• You are not VAT-registered and have one counter. A vendor free plan or a careful spreadsheet gets you a product list, a daily sales total and a stock count, which is already far more than the notebook.
• You do fewer than about 30–50 bills a day. At that volume the speed of the till does not matter and a phone is fine.
• You are testing whether a shop idea works. Do not sign a 12-month contract for a kiosk that may close in three.
• You have a developer in the family or on staff and actually want to own the system. Self-hosted ERPNext is a serious, capable choice for you.
• You sell only through Facebook and deliver by courier. Order volume is low, stock is small, and a sheet plus a payment app covers it.

And these are the signs that free has stopped being free.

• You have received, or expect, a VAT registration and need Mushak 6.3 on every invoice.
• You are opening a second outlet, or moving stock between a warehouse and a shop.
• You cannot say how much stock you hold today without counting it.
• You lost a day of sales, once, and it still bothers you.
• Your cashier is faster than your POS.
• You spend more than an hour a week doing things the software should do.

When two or more of those are true, the ৳1,500 a month for a Lite plan, or the equivalent from any vendor that ticks the boxes, is usually cheaper than the hours you are spending. The how to choose guide walks through the next step.

Six questions to ask before trusting any free POS

Run these on a free plan exactly as you would at a paid demo.

1. 1Where is my data stored, how often is it backed up, and how do I download all of it today?
2. 2Turn off the Wi-Fi. Can I complete a bill, and what happens to it when the connection returns?
3. 3Show me the invoice. Is it a Mushak 6.3 or a generic receipt with a tax line?
4. 4What is the price of the first paid tier, in taka, and what triggers the upgrade?
5. 5If the app stops working on a Friday night, who do I contact and when do they reply?
6. 6For self-hosted: who applies security updates, and what happens if that person leaves?

The bottom line

Free POS software in Bangladesh is real and useful. A vendor free plan will run a single non-VAT counter with no cash outlay, and self-hosted ERPNext will run almost anything if you bring the skills. What free tiers consistently lack is Mushak 6.3, multi-outlet control, a phone number to call and a backup someone else is responsible for, and the hidden costs are hosting, a developer and the day you lose data. Over twelve months, a free plan costs ৳0 and our Lite plan costs ৳18,000; self-hosting with a developer typically costs more than both. Match the option to where your shop actually is, not where you hope it will be, and move when the signs say so.

If you want to see what the ৳1,500 buys on your own product list, start free with the 14-day refund window, or book a demo and bring the six questions.