Scavenger Hunt Apps with Awesome Free Tiers

Most scavenger hunt platforms advertise a "free" option. In practice, most of those are either 14-day trials, demos capped at five participants, or stripped-down versions missing the features you actually need to run an event.

This post looks at which scavenger hunt apps offer free tiers you can actually run a real event on, and which don't, despite the marketing.

Pricing and tier details below are accurate as of 29 May 2026. Plans change, verify directly on each vendor's pricing page before committing.

What "truly usable" means here

For a free tier to count as usable, we're looking for:

• No time limit. A 14-day trial is a trial, not a free tier.
• Enough capacity for a real event. Five-participant caps don't qualify.
• Most of the core features. If the free version can't run a basic hunt, it's a demo.
• Clear terms on commercial use. Either commercial use is allowed, or the personal-use restriction is stated plainly.

Watermarks or platform branding in the player-facing app are common trade-offs on free tiers and don't disqualify them.

The apps that pass

PlayTours

Free tier: 25 active devices at a time, unlimited total devices.

The free tier includes 100% of features, nothing is gated behind paid plans, and the same premium customer support offered on paid tiers. Commercial use is allowed. The player-facing app shows a PlayTours watermark.

The 25-device cap applies to concurrent active devices, not total participants, so events run in waves or shifts can reach more people than the cap suggests. Paid tiers start at $35/month (5 active devices, no watermark).

Actionbound

Free tier: Personal tier, free for non-commercial use.

Includes the core features for creating, publishing, and evaluating Bounds (their term for hunts).

Key restrictions on the free tier: no commercial use, no time limits on Bounds, no sharing or merging Bounds, no Bound Challenge, no folder organization. Secret (password-protected) Bounds cost €7 each.

The free tier is positioned for birthday parties, bachelor parties, and similar private events. For team building, marketing activations, or any paid use, you need the PRO tier.

Goosechase

Free tier: Recreational tier, $0 per Experience.

Includes up to 3 teams or individual participants, 1 live Experience at a time, unlimited missions, 250+ pre-built templates, automatic scoring and leaderboard, and in-app messaging.

The 3-team cap is the main constraint. Workable for a family, a few friends, or a small classroom split into teams, but not for most organized events. Paid Experiences start at $399 each.

The apps that don't

Loquiz

No free tier. The "Free trial" is 14 days, capped at 10 devices and watermarked with the Loquiz logo. Paid plans start at €9/month plus €9 per device.

Turfhunt

No free tier listed. The cheapest plan is Lite at €29/month, which includes 1 live game, 50 monthly players, and 1 CMS user. (Turfhunt is by Locatify.)

Grandstand

No free tier listed. Pricing starts at $500/year for the Bronze tier. The product is aimed at fairs, livestock shows, and similar large events rather than general scavenger hunts.

Which one to pick

Comparing the three free tiers head-to-head:

• Goosechase Recreational caps at 3 teams per Experience. That's workable for a family game night or a very small classroom split, but most organized events exceed 3 teams immediately, which makes this closer to a demo than a usable free plan.
• Actionbound Personal allows uncapped participants but blocks commercial use entirely and omits several features on the free tier: time limits, Bound Challenge, sharing, merging, folder organization. Secret Bounds cost €7 each. It's a fit for hobbyists running a one-off non-commercial event where none of those features matter.
• PlayTours Free is the only free tier that allows commercial use, includes 100% of platform features, supports 25 active devices, and provides the same premium customer support as paid plans. The trade-off is the PlayTours watermark in the player-facing app.

For most real events, anything commercial, anything over 3 teams, or anything that needs the full feature set, PlayTours' free tier is the only one that doesn't force a paid upgrade. Actionbound remains a reasonable option in the narrow case where the event is strictly non-commercial, the missing features don't matter, and a no-watermark experience outweighs everything else.

If your events are larger than what any free tier supports, all six platforms have paid plans, but the pricing models differ significantly (per-event, per-device, per-month, per-year), so it's worth running the math for your specific event size before committing.