“Free” gets used loosely in this category. Here is exactly what Nesayo's free plan includes, what stays paid, and how that compares to two vendors who also use the word “free.”
Last reviewed 2026-09-25
“Free pharmacy billing software” is one of the most-searched phrases among Indian chemists, and most of what ranks for it is a free trial wearing “free” as a headline. This page is about the actual distinction, and about exactly what Nesayo’s free plan includes and does not include — stated plainly enough that you can check every line against the live pricing page yourself.
Billing on Nesayo is free forever — no card at signup, no bill cap, no clock counting down on the offer. It stays free because the free tier is deliberately limited to the parts that cost very little to run per pharmacy: bills, GST invoices, stock, and the legal record-keeping a pharmacy is required to maintain anyway. The parts that use real computing time per use — voice billing, reading a prescription photo, and the autonomous AI agents — sit behind a paid plan, and our team would rather say so here than have you find it out mid-bill at the counter.
What follows: what “free” actually includes on Nesayo, what is paid and why, the two Drugs and Cosmetics Act obligations that apply to a pharmacy whatever software it runs, the GST rate that actually applies to medicines since the September 2025 reform, and — because “free” gets used loosely in this category — two real, checkable examples of what other vendors call free.
Search “free pharmacy billing software” and most results are a 14-day or 30-day trial with “Free” in the headline, or a free tier narrow enough that it cannot actually run a shop day to day. Two real examples, checked directly rather than assumed:
Neither of those is a criticism — a trial and a paid licence are both reasonable ways to sell software. The point is that “free” in a headline and “free forever, no card, no bill cap” are different claims, and only one of them is checkable just by using the product for as long as you like. Nesayo’s free billing tier is the second kind, with no end date attached to it.
Everything below is free with no card, no bill cap and no time limit — checked against the live pricing page as of September 2026:
None of that is a stripped-down preview of a paid product — it is the actual billing and compliance layer, because a pharmacy’s legal record-keeping should not depend on which plan it can afford.
Three AI features sit behind a paid plan: voice billing, photo prescription scanning, and the five autonomous AI agents (Expiry Guard, Refill Radar, Payment Advisor, Stock Sense and the Morning Briefing). Photographing a purchase invoice to bring stock in is a different thing from photographing a prescription to bill from it — the purchase-invoice route stays free, because it is stock import rather than AI-assisted dispensing.
Every paid plan starts with 200 AI-assisted bills free, with no time limit — not a 14-day window, so a quiet week at a small shop never eats into it. After that, as of September 2026: Starter is ₹399/month (₹3,990/year) and adds voice billing in Hindi and English, photo prescription scanning and automatic patient reminders. AI Employee is ₹999/month (₹9,990/year) and adds all five agents, plus a Tally export (XML and CSV) for your accountant. A separate Chain plan covers owners running more than one pharmacy under a single console, currently by invitation.
The reasoning, plainly: billing and compliance cost very little to run per pharmacy, so they can stay free indefinitely. Recognising speech, reading a photograph accurately, and an agent that checks your stock on a schedule all use real computing time per use, so those carry a price. Our team would rather draw that line clearly here than have you discover it mid-bill.
Rule 65(3) of the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945 requires every sale of a Schedule H1 medicine — mainly third- and fourth-generation antibiotics, some psychotropic drugs and anti-TB drugs — to be recorded in a separate register at the time of sale: the prescriber’s name and address, the patient’s name, the medicine and the quantity supplied, kept for three years and open to inspection on demand.
That obligation exists whether or not you use any software at all — a paper register satisfies it too. What software changes is whether the register gets filled honestly in the moment or reconstructed from memory at closing time. On Nesayo, Schedule H1 sales are logged automatically at billing: date, medicine, batch, quantity and bill number, with the patient and prescriber names entered on the bill. The batch is the one the sale actually deducted, so the log and the shelf cannot quietly disagree. Nesayo does not record the prescriber’s address yet, so the pharmacist adds it to complete the Rule 65(3)(h) register. This sits in the free tier, the same as billing.
Coverage of pharmacy compliance online often quotes the heaviest Section 27 penalties for any lapse under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940. That is not accurate for every case, and it is worth stating correctly rather than repeating the scariest figure available.
Section 27 sets different penalties for different violations. Manufacture or sale of a drug without a valid licence carries a minimum of 3 years’ imprisonment (extendable to 5) and a fine of at least ₹1 lakh, or three times the value of the drugs seized. Adulterated or spurious drugs likely to cause death or grievous harm carry a minimum of 10 years (extendable to life) and a fine of at least ₹10 lakh. A contravention of the Act’s other provisions — which is where selling a Schedule H1 drug without a prescription falls, under Section 27(d) — carries a lower minimum: imprisonment of at least 1 year (extendable to 2) and a fine of at least ₹20,000.
None of that makes a missing register entry trivial — it remains an offence, and exactly which tier applies to a specific lapse is a question for your state drug licensing authority, not a blog post. It is a reason to keep the record right in the first place, which is what a register built as a by-product of billing is for.
Since 22 September 2025, GST on most retail medicine formulations — tablets, capsules, syrups, injections and other dosage forms under HSN codes 3001 to 3006 — is 5%, down from the earlier 12% slab. This followed the GST Council’s reform announced on 3 September 2025 and formalised in CBIC Notification No. 9/2025-Central Tax (Rate), effective 22 September 2025.
That is not the whole picture, and a page that states “medicines are taxed at 5%” as a flat rule gets it wrong in one direction: the same reform moved a specific list of roughly three dozen life-saving and biologic medicines — largely high-cost oncology and rare-disease drugs — to 0%, under Notification No. 10/2025. The accurate statement is 5% on nearly all retail medicine, nil on a named list of exceptions, and neither single number applies to everything on a shelf.
Nesayo applies the correct rate automatically, matched to each medicine from a maintained rate table rather than one rate typed once for the whole catalogue — including the nil-rated exceptions — so a bill raised before the September 2025 reform and one raised after it are not silently taxed the same way.
Free data migration is part of the free plan, not a paid onboarding service. A CSV or Excel export from whatever you run today — including exports from the desktop systems most Indian pharmacies already use — is read directly rather than retyped. A photographed purchase invoice works the same way for bringing new stock in, and that path is free too, distinct from the paid photo-prescription route described above.
What does not carry across automatically is anything your current system never captured — a batch number or expiry date that was never entered stays blank until the next purchase brings a correct value in, rather than being invented. A pharmacy typically has complete batch-wise stock after one full purchase cycle, not on day one, and that is expected rather than a sign of a bad import.
There is no card requirement anywhere in this path, and no deadline by which you have to decide on a paid plan. Billing stays free for as long as you use it that way — that is the whole point of “free forever” as opposed to a trial.
Free forever, with no card at signup and no time limit — not a 14-day or 30-day trial. Billing, GST invoicing, the medicine catalogue, batch and expiry tracking with FEFO, Schedule H1 sale logging and a WhatsApp bill link are all included at ₹0. You only see a price when you choose to add voice billing, photo prescription scanning or the AI agents.
Unlimited GST billing synced across devices, the full catalogue of more than 2.5 lakh medicines with instant search, automatic GST and Schedule H/H1 flagging on every line, batch-wise stock with FEFO, expired batches refused at billing, expiry alerts showing the rupee value at risk, a WhatsApp bill-sharing link, GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B summaries (JSON and CSV) for your CA, and free migration of your existing stock and customer data.
Voice billing, photographing a prescription to bill from it, and the five autonomous AI agents (Expiry Guard, Refill Radar, Payment Advisor, Stock Sense and the Morning Briefing) are paid features. Photographing a purchase invoice to bring stock in is a different thing and stays free — that is stock import, not AI-assisted dispensing.
As of September 2026: Starter is ₹399/month (₹3,990/year) and adds voice billing and photo prescription scanning; AI Employee is ₹999/month (₹9,990/year) and adds all five AI agents plus a Tally export for your accountant. Every paid plan starts with 200 AI-assisted bills free, with no time limit, before either price applies.
A usage-based allowance, not a calendar trial: you get the full AI Employee experience for 200 AI-assisted bills, with no card and no expiry date on the offer, so a slow week never eats into a trial period the way a 14-day window would. Your free-tier billing and your data continue either way once the allowance is used.
No. Signup for the free billing plan does not ask for a card, and none of the free-tier features stop working after a set number of days.
5% on nearly all retail medicine formulations (HSN 3001–3006), following the GST Council reform effective 22 September 2025, applied automatically per medicine. A specific list of roughly three dozen life-saving and biologic medicines is nil-rated under the same reform; Nesayo's catalogue carries that exception too, rather than a single rate for everything.
The requirement itself — recording every H1 sale with the prescriber, patient, medicine and quantity, per Rule 65(3) of the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules — applies whichever software you use, or none at all. Nesayo logs Schedule H1 sales as a by-product of billing — patient, prescriber, medicine, batch and quantity — and the pharmacist adds the prescriber’s address, which Nesayo does not record yet. It is part of the free plan.
Yes. CSV and Excel exports, including from the desktop systems most Indian pharmacies already run, are read directly, and migration itself carries no charge. Data your previous system never captured — an untyped batch number or expiry date — stays blank until the next purchase supplies it, rather than being guessed.
Worth checking directly rather than taking a headline's word for it — some vendors use “Free Forever” language while the free tier itself carries limited features (Vyapar, per vyaparapp.in, checked 21 September 2026); others are not marketed as free at all and offer a trial ahead of a paid licence (RetailGraph, per softwaresuggest.com, checked 21 September 2026). Nesayo's free billing tier has no time limit and no reduced feature set within what it covers — the limits are which features are in it, not how long you can use them.
There is nothing to download from an app store. Nesayo runs in a supported browser on your phone or computer, and where your browser supports it you can install it to your home screen or desktop. Typed billing is free forever; start free, no card.
Yes. Nesayo runs in a supported browser, so the same account works on an Android phone and on a Windows or Mac computer. Typed billing is free on all of them, with no bill cap.
Nesayo's typed billing is free forever: unlimited GST bills, batch-wise stock and expiry tracking, with no time limit and no card. Voice and photo billing have a free introductory allowance; additional AI usage and premium features are available on optional paid plans.
GST invoicing, Schedule H1 sale logging, FEFO batch tracking and more than 2.5 lakh medicines pre-loaded, all in the free plan, free forever.
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