Comparison ·
Spreadsheets vs sample tracking software: an honest comparison.
For a lab with a few dozen samples and one disciplined owner, a spreadsheet is genuinely enough — it costs $0 and everyone already knows it. It breaks on two things a sheet cannot record: who did what, and when. Software that fixes that starts at $0 for 100 samples and $12/month after. Both cases are argued below, including the one for keeping your sheet.
What does the spreadsheet do better?
Four things, and they are not small. It is free, forever, with no vendor that can raise prices or shut down. It is infinitely flexible — any column you can imagine, right now, no feature request. Everyone in the lab already knows how to use it. And your data sits in a file you hold, not in an account you rent.
If your lab is one or two people, the samples fit in one freezer, and the sheet has a single disciplined owner — keep the spreadsheet. Our free template is a better starting point than this pitch.
Where do sample spreadsheets break?
Five failure modes, in the order labs usually meet them:
- Version forks. The sheet gets copied — for a subgroup, for a backup, for a leaving student — and now two versions disagree and nobody knows which is true.
- No per-sample history.A row shows the current state. Who thawed it, when it moved, what it looked like last March — overwritten. When a result needs auditing, the history is somebody’s memory.
- Concurrent edits. Two people, one row, last save wins. Shared drives soften this; they do not fix it.
- Search across time. “Which samples did MK handle in June?” is a question a sheet answers only if someone typed every handling event in — see failure mode 2.
- The bench. The samples are in the freezer room. The sheet is at the desk. If updating the record means walking back and taking gloves off, the record gets updated later, from memory — or not at all. The spreadsheet is not the problem. Walking back to the desk is.
Each mode has a free patch — one owner, append-only notes, weekly exports — and the patches genuinely work for a while. The template page documents them.
What does each one actually record?
| Shared spreadsheet | tinysamples | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to start | $0 | $0 (up to 100 samples) |
| Cost at scale | $0 | $12/mo solo · $29/mo for up to 20 users |
| Who and when, recorded | If someone types it | Automatic on every action |
| Per-sample history | No — rows overwrite | A timeline per sample |
| Two people editing | Last save wins | Safe |
| At the bench, gloves on | Desk software | Phone browser |
| Custom columns | Unlimited, instant | Custom fields on Pro |
| Your exit | It is your file | CSV export (Pro/Team), 30-day window |
What does switching actually cost?
The honest bill: a learning curve measured in minutes, but a real one. $0 while you are under 100 samples, $12/month past it — and if you want your existing sheet imported instead of retyped, CSV import is a Pro feature, so that is $12/month from day one. And trust in a vendor with no customers to show you: tinysamples is new, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The exit is in writing — CSV export and a 30-day read-only window if you cancel.
Free for 100 samples. No card.