Free temperature monitoring — what you really get

Free temperature monitoring sounds like a catch — and on the market it usually is one. "Free" most often means a 14-day trial, a version without alerts, or a plan where the measurement history vanishes after a week. At Nextriv we approached it differently: the FREE plan is a fully fledged, open-ended plan with real alerts and reports. In this article we show honestly what exactly you get for 0 PLN — and just as honestly, where the free ride ends.

What free temperature monitoring covers at Nextriv

The FREE plan doesn't expire and doesn't ask for a payment card. Its boundaries are resource limits, not feature limits:

Resource	FREE plan
Sensors	10
Gateways	1
Users	2
Locations	1
Alert rules	5
Measurement history	365 days
Report retention	30 days

Ten sensors and one gateway make a real installation: a pharmacy with a few fridges, a server room, a small warehouse, a clinic with a vaccine fridge. A year of measurement history means that at an inspection you can show the record from any day of the past 12 months — not just the past week.

Alerts: full, not stripped down

This is the most important difference versus typical free plans. On Nextriv FREE you get exactly the same alerting engine as on the paid plan:

• four thresholds per metric — warning and critical, lower and upper (e.g. a warning at 6 °C, a critical alarm at 8 °C);
• event deduplication — one active event per sensor and metric, instead of an avalanche of repeated notifications;
• readable alarm codes (ALM-XXXXXX), comments and the full event lifecycle: active → acknowledged → resolved;
• every notification channel: email, SMS, web push, Discord, Microsoft Teams and an in-app audible alarm — with no surcharge for "premium channels". (Webhooks integrations — forwarding events to your own systems — are a PRO plan feature.)

The system watches the devices themselves too: a sensor that stops reporting is marked offline (by default after twice its reporting interval), and a gateway — by default after 15 minutes of silence; you can set both thresholds yourself, separately for each device. So you'll learn about a gateway power failure from an alert, not from an empty chart a week later.

The limit of five alert rules sounds modest, but a single rule handles four thresholds per metric — in practice five rules cover a typical small installation with temperature and humidity.

Reports and data: no frills, but complete

The FREE plan generates PDF reports with a summary and charts — a clean document for internal records or for an inspector. Add to that basic XLSX and CSV exports, so your data is never the platform's hostage: you can pull it into Excel at any moment.

Dashboards aren't cut down either — nearly 20 widget types (KPIs, multi-series charts, sensor tables, gateway statuses, offline device lists and more) work on every plan. Underneath runs the same time-series database with automatic data-resolution selection, so a full-year chart opens as smoothly as the view of the last 24 hours.

Two small retention limits are worth knowing: generated reports are kept on FREE for 30 days (the source measurements of course stay for the full year — a report can simply be generated again), and the notification history — also 30 days. For day-to-day work that's enough; longer retention periods are PRO plan territory.

Where free ends

We promised honesty here, so let's be specific. You move to the PRO plan (99 PLN net / 30 days or 990 PLN net / 365 days) when:

• you outgrow the limits — you need an eleventh sensor, a second gateway, a third user, another location or a sixth alert rule;
• you need escalation — escalation policies ("if nobody acknowledges within 15 minutes, call the next level"), recipient groups and external contacts are PRO features; on FREE, notifications go to defined recipients without an escalation chain;
• the audit demands more — report schedules, extended reports with statistics and percentiles, digitally signed PDFs (SHA-256 with a QR verification code) and an audit trail with five-year retention are PRO;
• you need longer history — FREE keeps 365 days of measurements, PRO 1825 days (5 years); reports are kept for 30 days on FREE, a year on PRO;
• you want the "growth" features — floor plans with sensor markers, virtual sensors, public widgets with expiry, custom branding and full data export.

There's a middle option too: add-ons to the FREE plan. An extra sensor slot costs 100 PLN net, a gateway slot — 1000 PLN net (one-off). It's the answer for installations that have outgrown the limit by two or three devices and don't need the rest of the PRO package. The full plan comparison is in the pricing.

Hardware you buy once — and it's the only real expense

The free plan applies to the software. The sensors and the gateway you purchase — a one-off expense, priced on request. The smallest installation needs just one compact gateway and a few sensors to start, e.g. the universal Nextriv Sense Essential: temperature and humidity, a sealed IP67 enclosure for indoors and out, batteries for at least 10 years and a local buffer of around 3,000 measurements, resent automatically after a connectivity gap.

After the purchase there are no hidden costs: you mount it yourself (tape, screws or cable ties — no cabling), and the platform detects sensors automatically within 30–180 seconds of switch-on.

Who FREE will serve for years

The FREE plan is not bait engineered to force payment after a month. If your installation fits within the limits — up to 10 sensors, one location, two people with access — you can run on it indefinitely, with full alerting and a year of recorded history. Typical examples: a pharmacy with a few fridges and a small store room, a single server room with sensors at the racks, a small food outlet with a cold room and display cases, a warehouse with a few temperature zones.

The signal that it's time for PRO is usually not the sensor count but how the work is organised: a third person who should respond to alarms, a second location to bring under supervision, or an auditor asking for signed reports and history longer than a year.

So the sensible strategy looks like this: start for free, prove the system on your own site, and move to PRO only when the installation or the audit requirements genuinely grow. Want to see the platform before buying hardware? Book a demo — we'll show alerts, reports and dashboards live.