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A free tier sounds great until the seat limit hits during your GOTV push. Here's the honest breakdown of what "free" canvassing apps actually include — and why a per-campaign price often costs a local race less than the free plan's hidden ceiling.
We sell a paid product, so take this with that in mind — but the seat-limit trap is real, and it catches local campaigns every cycle.
When you search for a free canvassing app, you are usually a local campaign — a city council seat, a school board race, a ballot measure — trying not to spend money you do not have. That instinct is right. The problem is that "free" in canvassing software almost always means one of three things: a hard cap on volunteers, voter data sold separately, or the field features stripped out of the free tier.
The volunteer cap is the one that hurts. A free plan that allows three or five users feels fine in March. Then you recruit twenty people for the final canvass weekend, the app locks you out, and you are migrating your whole field operation to a new tool with two weeks left. The free plan did not save you money — it cost you the worst possible week.
doornoc takes a different shape on purpose. It is priced per campaign, not per volunteer, so a small race pays one flat price and adds the whole field team without a meter running. There is no separate data invoice — the voter file is built in. It is not free, but for a campaign that will actually recruit more than a handful of volunteers, it is usually cheaper than the free plan's ceiling forces you into.
Four questions that separate a real free tool from a trial in disguise.
Look at the seat cap, then picture your final canvass weekend, not today. If the free tier breaks at the team size you will actually field, it is a trial, not a plan.
A free canvassing app with no voter file means you still have to buy or wire in data separately. doornoc ships the voter file inside the tool — filter and route in one place.
Free tiers often cut offline support first. If the app cannot log a knock in a dead zone and sync it later, your data has holes exactly where rural and suburban turf lives.
If the free app makes you build walk lists in a spreadsheet, the "free" is paid for in volunteer-coordinator hours. doornoc's auto turf cutting does it in seconds.
The full tool on one race, priced per campaign — not a free tier you outgrow.
The canvassing app hands each volunteer their route and the voter detail for every door, with one-tap outcomes.
Knocks and supporter IDs land on the dashboard the moment a volunteer taps them — manage the program live instead of keying in paper at midnight.
Per-campaign pricing, no seat meter, no separate data bill. Add five volunteers or fifty — see canvassing software for how it fits together.
A few tools advertise a free tier, but read what the free version actually does. Most "free" canvassing apps either cap you at a handful of volunteers, hide the voter data behind a paid add-on, or strip out the features that matter at the door — offline recording, turf cutting, live tracking. doornoc is honest about this: we are priced per campaign rather than per volunteer, so a small local race pays one predictable price and gets the whole tool, instead of a hollow free plan you outgrow in week one.
Because the free tier is usually the bait, not the product. The volunteer seat limit is the trap — a free plan that allows three users is useless the moment you recruit a tenth volunteer for a GOTV weekend. Then you are migrating mid-campaign, which is the worst possible time. The real math is to price for the team size you will actually have in the last two weeks, not the size you have today.
Four things, and most free tools miss at least one: the voter list on every volunteer's phone, a walkable route they do not have to plan by hand, one-tap outcomes so logging a door takes a second, and reliable offline recording for streets with no signal. doornoc does all four. If a free app cannot record a knock in a dead zone and sync it later, your data has holes exactly where rural and suburban turf lives.
doornoc is priced per campaign with no per-volunteer seats, so a city council or school board race pays the same flat campaign price whether it runs five volunteers or fifty. There is no separate voter-data invoice. See the homepage for current pricing — the point is that a local campaign gets the same voter data and auto-routing the big races run on, without enterprise rates or a hidden seat meter.
Yes. Because pricing is per campaign, you can run a single race on doornoc without signing your whole organization up for a year. Upload a list or use the built-in voter file, cut turf, and have your team knocking the same day. That is the closest thing to a real trial: the full tool on one campaign, not a crippled free tier.
The full canvassing app — voter data, auto turf, offline recording, live reporting — priced per campaign, not per volunteer. No free-tier ceiling to outgrow.