Is Rostered Free? What's Free for Families, and What Clubs Pay

The short answer

Free for every parent and athlete. Clubs from $9 a month.

That is the whole pricing model in one sentence, and we would rather you read it here than find it out three screens into a signup form. If you are a parent, a grandparent, or an athlete, Rostered costs you nothing and there is nothing to upgrade to. If you are the person running the club, Rostered is a paid product. There is no free club plan, and no free tier that stops working once your roster grows.

Most searches for a free sports team app are really two different questions wearing the same words. A coach or club administrator is asking “can I run my team without a budget?” A parent is asking “am I about to get charged for my kid’s practice schedule?” The honest answers are different, so here they both are.

What families get without paying anything

A parent or athlete account in Rostered is free and complete. The basics are never paywalled, and there is no in-app purchase anywhere in the iOS or Android apps. What that covers:

The whole schedule. Practices, games, tournaments, and custom events for every one of your children, across every team they play on, in one place.
RSVPs. Answer per athlete in the app or on the web, with email and push reminders that link straight to the event.
Calendar subscriptions. Feeds you can add to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, or Outlook at whatever level fits: one athlete, your whole family, a team, or a division. They stay in sync when a practice moves.
Team messaging. Huddles channels for your athlete’s team and division, with reactions, attachments, and mentions.
Club and coach emails, kept in the app. Emails sent through Rostered are listed in the app too, so Tuesday’s update is still findable on Saturday without digging through your inbox. Replies work like normal email, from your own email client.
Polls. When a coach asks the team to vote on a practice time or a tournament, you answer from the same app.
Volunteer sign-up. Where a club has volunteer jobs turned on, guardians see open shifts and claim them.
Attendance and reminders. Nudges before events for families who have not answered yet.
Native apps on iOS and Android, plus the web. Same account, no separate purchase.

One account covers your whole family. You are not paying per child or per team, because you are not paying at all.

Grandparents and extended family are free too

Rostered has a read-only “fan” account that a guardian can invite. A fan follows the specific athletes the guardian picks, and sees that athlete’s schedule, games, and media. Nothing else in the club opens up to them, and no one is billed for the invitation.

This matters more than it sounds. A lot of team apps price by seat, so the grandparent who wants to watch the score roll in is a line item someone has to justify. Here they are not.

Why the price counts athletes, not adults

A club’s package in Rostered is sized by how many athletes it carries. That is the number the price is set against. Adding a second parent to a family, or a stepparent, or a grandparent as a fan, does not change what the club pays.

We are spelling this out because it is the part clubs usually get burned on elsewhere. A per-user price quietly punishes exactly the behavior a club wants: more adults paying attention, more families reachable, fewer messages relayed through one overloaded parent. Counting athletes instead means the club can invite everyone who should be in the loop without doing arithmetic first.

What the club pays for

Clubs choose a package and pay one flat monthly fee, starting at $9 a month and rising with the size of the roster. Every package includes the core of the product rather than unlocking it piece by piece, and bigger packages add the club-level tools a multi-division organization needs. The pricing page lists the packages and what each one includes.

Two things worth knowing before you compare us with anything else:

There is no free club tier. All five packages are paid. We would rather charge $9 than build a free plan and then make it worth escaping.

The price is the price. No ads, no per-feature upsells inside the app, and no charge to the families using it.

What “free for families” does not mean

Three honest caveats, because a page about what is free should be the last place to get slippery.

It does not mean your club dues are free. Rostered is the software your club runs its season on. What the club charges your family for coaching, pool or field time, travel, and uniforms is entirely the club’s business and has nothing to do with this price.

It does not mean every feature is on for you. Some parts of Rostered depend on the sport and on what the club switches on. Live scoring is the clearest example: it works where the sport supports it and the club has enabled it, not everywhere by default.

It does not mean signing in is optional. RSVPs and schedules live behind a login. That is deliberate, because a child’s schedule and roster should not be readable by anyone holding a forwarded link.

No ads, and we are not selling your family

The usual way a product is free for the people using it is that those people are the product. That is not what is happening here, and the reason is boring rather than noble: the clubs pay us, so we do not need a second business model.

There is no advertising in Rostered. There is no ad software in the apps at all. And we do not sell your personal information to data brokers. If any of that ever changes, our privacy policy is where you would see it first.

Parents’ email addresses are for the club to reach them about their kid’s season. That is the job.

If you are comparing free sports team apps

You will find plenty that are free at the door. It is worth asking three questions of any of them, including this one:

Who pays, and for what? If the answer is not obvious in one sentence, find out before your roster is inside it.
What happens at 40 athletes? Free plans tend to have a cliff. Ours does not have a free plan, which is a different answer, not a better-sounding one.
What do the parents see? The app families actually open is the one that decides whether any of this works. If parents get ads, upsells, or a nagged-down version of the app, adoption dies and so does your schedule.

For Rostered: the club pays, from $9 a month. Parents and athletes never do. There is no cliff for families because there is no ceiling on them in the first place.

Getting started

Clubs can sign up directly or get in touch for a walkthrough first. Parents do not sign up here at all. You will get an invitation from your club, and your account will already be free when it arrives.