If you are tracking tools across job sites, GoCodes comes up early and for good reason. It is built for exactly that — construction, field crews, equipment that lives in a truck — and it does things a spreadsheet cannot. This is not a page about why it is bad.
It is a page about the shape of what it asks for, which is easy to miss when you are comparing feature lists. I am not going to quote figures; they change, and a stale number about someone else's product is worse than none.
Credit where it is due: the price is published
GoCodes puts its plans on its website with the limits written next to them. After looking at a lot of tools in this space, that is worth saying out loud — several of the biggest names make you book a call before you learn anything.
What it actually asks
It meters two things at once. Every plan includes a number of assets and a number of user logins, bundled together. You can be pushed into the next tier by buying more equipment, or by adding the foreman who needs to see it. Extra seats are sold in blocks rather than one at a time, so adding a single person can cost the same as adding several.
That second axis is the one worth sitting with. On a growing crew the instinct is to give everyone access — and that instinct is the expensive one.
Billing is annual. Their own reasoning is that it keeps costs predictable and access uninterrupted, which is fair. It also means the commitment is a year at a time, and tool tracking is sticky: by renewal you will have a season of history in it and moving is work.
Tags come with it. On the lower plan you print your own; from the middle plans up, branded QR tags ship with the account. This is a genuine advantage and I am not going to pretend otherwise — durable tags that survive a job site are a real product, not a detail.
When GoCodes is the right answer, plainly
- Your tools live outdoors and get destroyed. Rugged printed tags built for that environment are worth paying for, and you cannot make them on an office printer.
- You need to know roughly where something is, not just who signed for it. Scan location data is their core pitch and a file on a laptop cannot do it.
- Several people scan things all day from their own phones, in the field, at the same time.
- You want kitting, attachments or offline mobile use on the higher plans.
If two or more of those describe your week, buy GoCodes. Genuinely. I would rather you found this page and bought the right tool than bought something from me that does not fit.
The question worth asking before any of this
Most crews searching for tool tracking software are trying to answer one question: who had the mitre saw last, and when is it coming back?
That is a custody question, and it does not need GPS, a cloud account, or a licence per person. It needs a list, a name, a date, and something that tells you when the date has passed.
If your problem is genuinely “where on the site is it right now”, you need software with a live location. If your problem is “who signed for it and did it come back”, quite a lot of what you would pay for is machinery you will never use.
Where the third option fits
- Sign a tool out to a named person, stamped with a date, so the argument three weeks later has an answer.
- A due-back date and an Overdue filter showing how many days late something is — “who is late”, not just “who has it”.
- Printable barcode labels generated from your own list, so the tags come off your own printer.
- Runs on a laptop in a site trailer with no signal, because it never talks to anything.
- Unlimited tools and unlimited people looking at it. Nothing is metered.
What it asks of you, stated as plainly as the rest
- One editor at a time. It is a file. Two people editing at once will lose work. If the whole crew needs to update it from their phones, this is the wrong tool and GoCodes is the right one.
- No location tracking. It records who signed for something, not where it is.
- No rugged tags. You print labels on a normal printer. For a workshop that is fine; for a muddy yard in February it is not.
- No mobile app, and nothing can be sent to you — overdue items are colour-coded on screen, but no alert exists, because sending one needs a server.
- Camera scanning only works on Android. Windows browsers and iPhones do not support the barcode API. A USB scanner works everywhere and costs about $25.
In exchange: one payment, no renewal, no per-seat licence, no annual commitment, and your records
stay in an .xlsx on your own disk.
Look at it before you decide
There is a live demo with sample data. It runs in your browser, it does not ask for an email, and you can click every screen — sign-out, the log, due dates, overdue, labels — before deciding whether any of it is for you.
It is $79 once. If ten minutes in the demo tells you that what you actually need is rugged tags and a crew scanning from their phones, go and buy GoCodes. That is the honest answer.