Free CAD/MDT for FiveM: What You Get and Where the Wall Is

You have twelve people, a Discord, and a server that runs three nights a week. Paying a subscription before your first patrol is a hard sell to yourself, let alone to whoever funds the game server.

A free CAD/MDT for FiveM is a real option, not a demo with the useful parts removed. Most communities start on one and stay there longer than they expect.

What matters is knowing which wall you hit first, so you pick a system you can grow inside instead of one you have to leave.

What Does a Free CAD/MDT for FiveM Include?

A free CAD/MDT for FiveM gives you the working core of dispatch: a live call queue, unit statuses, citizen and vehicle records, warrants, and reports that persist between sessions. Free plans limit how many members you can enroll and how finely you can slice permissions. They rarely remove the daily workflow itself.

The parts that are never paywalled

Calls, units, and records are the product. A system that charges for the call queue is not a free tier, it is a trailer.

Look for all four of the core objects on the free plan. Calls with a location, type, priority, and assignment history. Units with a callsign and a status. Citizens, vehicles, warrants, and reports that survive a restart. Some way to say who is allowed to do what.

If you are new to the terms, the plain explanation of what a CAD/MDT system is covers all four in ten minutes.

The parts that usually are not

Free plans buy their margin somewhere. The usual places are member count, custom branding, permission granularity beyond a handful of preset roles, and retention of old audit entries.

None of those affect a Tuesday patrol with fourteen people online. All of them affect a community of three hundred with four departments.

When Does a Free Tier Stop Being Enough?

Member count is the first wall

You will notice this one before any other. Free plans commonly cap enrollment somewhere between twenty five and fifty members, and the cap counts everyone who has ever been added, including the six people who tried the server once in March.

Run an inactivity sweep before you assume you have outgrown the plan. Communities routinely sit at ninety percent of a member cap with a third of those accounts dormant.

Permission depth is the second

The moment you promote your first supervisor, you want a rank that can reassign calls and edit records but cannot purge them. Preset roles usually cover cadet, officer, and administrator, and nothing between.

That gap is small until an administrator deletes a warrant during an argument and you have no tier that could have stopped it. Rank permission tiers and an audit log of edits and deletions are the two things worth paying for first, and the community administration guide covers how to structure them.

The third wall is quieter

Multi department and multi platform rosters. You added a fire division, or a Roblox division, or both, and your one roster is now trying to be three.

How to Launch on a Free Plan Without Rebuilding Later

Decide departments before you enroll anyone

Renaming a department after fifty people hold callsigns is a bad afternoon that produces nothing. Write down your departments and four or five ranks first. Enroll second.

This costs twenty minutes and it is the single highest return decision on this page.

Confirm export before your first patrol

Ask how you get your records out, in what format, and whether the free plan includes it. A system with no data export is a system you cannot leave, and you find that out in month nine with four hundred reports inside it.

Test it with ten records rather than trusting the feature list. The checklist for choosing a CAD/MDT lists the rest of what is cheap to test now and expensive to discover later.

Do not staff a dispatcher you do not have

The free plan question and the dispatcher question look separate. They are the same question.

Most communities have nobody in the dispatch seat on a normal night, because people join police roleplay to drive and work scenes. A CAD that assumes a human is sorting the queue will sit unused by week three whatever it costs. PlateNet CAD/MDT routes calls automatically, orders the queue by priority, drops stale units out of the routing pool, and lets any officer claim an open call from the MDT. The automatic dispatch and call routing guide covers the mechanics.

What Free Costs You in Time Instead of Money

Self hosting is the other kind of free. You run it on your own box, you pay nothing per month, and you own every problem at midnight.

That trade is worth it for some communities and terrible for others. It comes down to whether you already keep a VPS patched and enjoy that work, which the hosted versus self hosted comparison walks through with real numbers.

A free CAD/MDT for FiveM that someone else hosts costs you nothing and no evenings. Start there. Move when a wall actually stops you, not when you imagine one might.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a genuinely free CAD/MDT for FiveM?

Yes. Free plans from hosted providers cover the call queue, unit statuses, citizen and vehicle records, warrants, and reports with no time limit. The limits are on member count and permission depth rather than on the core workflow.

How many members can a free CAD plan handle?

Most free tiers cap between twenty five and fifty enrolled members. That covers a community running two or three patrol nights a week. Run an inactivity sweep before you upgrade, since dormant accounts usually occupy a third of the cap.

Does a free CAD system cost server performance?

No, if it is web based. The CAD runs in a browser outside the game with its own database, so nothing is added to your resources folder and your frame times do not change.

What is the first thing I should pay for?

Permission tiers and audit logging. Those are what let you hand your community to other people safely. Branding and higher member caps matter less than being able to prove who deleted a record.

Can I move from a free plan to another system later?

Only if your current plan includes data export. Confirm that on the way in, not on the way out, and confirm the system you are moving to accepts an import.

Do I need a CAD at all with twelve members?

At twelve, memory still works and nothing is being missed. Around twenty five active members, warrants start getting forgotten between sessions and calls stop having a clear owner. That is the usual point communities adopt one.