Free Concert Trackers: Where Each One Stops

By Alexandra P. · Published 2026-09-20 · 6 min read

Founder of Gigvault — the concert tracker for live music fans.

"Free" is on the homepage of every concert app ever made. It is also the least useful word on it, because it never means the same thing twice.

Sometimes free means free. Sometimes it means free for ten concerts. Sometimes it means you can log everything but the year-in-review — the one thing you actually wanted — sits behind a subscription. The word does not tell you which.

So here is the only question worth asking a concert diary before you start feeding it years of your life: where does this one stop? We went and checked, at each provider's own pricing page, in September 2026.

Where the free tiers actually stop

Two things jump out of that table, and they point in opposite directions. One app caps the diary itself. And Gigvault is not the only free option — anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Ten concerts is a fortnight, not an archive

Radar is the closest thing to a direct competitor, and it is a well-made app. Its free tier stops at ten gigs, five friends, one private photo per gig and one festival, with Concert Wrapped reduced to a two-slide preview.

Run the arithmetic against your own life. Three or four shows a year and you hit the ceiling in your third year. Go to one festival and log the bands individually — which is the entire point of logging a festival — and you can hit ten in a single weekend.

That is the moment a free tier stops being a tier and becomes a demo. A diary you cannot finish is not a diary. And the backlog is exactly the thing that makes these apps worth using: most people arrive carrying fifteen years of half-remembered shows, and a ten-entry ceiling makes it structurally impossible to even try before paying.

What Gigvault's free tier includes — and what it doesn't

Straight, with the limits included rather than buried:

• Unlimited concerts. No cap, no counter, no eleventh-show paywall. This is the part we will not put behind a subscription, because the archive is the product.
• The full Concert Wrapped, every year, automatically — not a preview.
• Setlists pulled in via setlist.fm, so you can see which songs were played on the night you were there.
• Three photos per concert. That is a real limit, and it is more than Radar's one. Unlimited photos and video need Pro, or Photographer Pro at $4.99/mo if you shoot gigs seriously.
• No video on free. Also a real limit. Stated plainly rather than discovered later.
• iOS, Android and the web on one account. Entering a decade of old shows is a laptop-and-a-cup-of-tea job, and app-only tools make that miserable.

No credit card to start. The full plan comparison is public.

The other genuinely free options, and what they trade away

Being honest about this is more useful to you than pretending we are alone.

setlist.fm is free, has been for years, and its "I was there" button builds a real attendance history with statistics. It is also the best setlist database in the world. What it does not do is host photographs at all — the maintainers have said image uploads remain on the roadmap without a date, because rights and moderation make it a large feature. So your setlists live there and your pictures live somewhere else, which means your concert history is in two places and neither is complete. We wrote a longer piece on whether you need both.

Concert Archives is free too, on web, iOS and Android, and it takes photos and videos. It is a genuine free alternative and the closest thing to a like-for-like option; there is an optional $4/month Patreon for extras. If you want the straight comparison, we have that one written up as well.

What Gigvault adds on top of free-and-unlimited is the yearly Concert Wrapped as a finished thing rather than a stats page, setlists attached to the night, and a diary that works the same on a phone in the queue and a laptop the next morning.

The cap always lands at the worst moment

Here is the pattern worth recognising, whichever app you choose.

Limits are never set where they would annoy a new user. They are set where the product becomes valuable — at the tenth entry, at the year-end summary, at the export button. That is deliberate design, not malice: it is where willingness to pay lives.

Which is why the questions to ask are not "is it free" but these four:

• Is there a ceiling on entries? Convert it into years of your own gig-going, not an abstract number.
• Is the year-in-review complete or a preview? "Preview", "taster" and "2 slides" all mean the same thing.
• What happens if you stop paying? Do your entries stay readable, or go behind the wall?
• Can you get your data out? Almost nobody asks this, and it is the most important one if you plan to keep this up for twenty years.

What Pro is actually for

Gigvault Pro costs $2.99 a month, or $29.99 a year, which is about 16 % less than paying monthly. It adds unlimited photos and video, deeper statistics, monthly recaps, the Concert Map and Concert Groups. Export is not one of them: CSV and JSON export of your whole history is free, in Settings, for everyone.

It does not unlock logging, it does not unlock Concert Wrapped, it does not unlock export, and it does not unlock your own history. Those stay free, permanently. Pro makes the record richer; it does not hold it hostage.

If that is the deal you want, start free and log the last three shows you remember. You will know within ten minutes whether the thing is for you — and you will not hit a wall at number eleven.

Sources

• Radar free tier: Radar's own Pro comparison page, checked September 2026 — up to 10 gigs, up to 5 friends, 1 private photo per gig, 1 festival, Concert Wrapped as a 2-slide preview. No price is published on the website; it states pricing is shown in the app by region.
• setlist.fm: free accounts with "I was there" attendance and statistics; the site's own support forum and FAQ confirm photo uploads are not currently possible and remain on the roadmap without a date.
• Concert Archives: free on web, iOS and Android for logging concerts with photos, videos and setlists, with an optional $4/month Patreon membership for extras.
• Gigvault limits: taken from the product itself rather than our marketing — 3 photos per concert and no video on the free plan, unlimited on Pro. Prices as published on our pricing page.

Third-party price-comparison sites disagreed with several of these figures. Where they did, the provider's own page was used.

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