Backbar
Inventory app for bars and restaurants: bottle counting, cocktail and dish recipes, cost and selling price calculation, supplier orders. Free Basic plan (a single venue, 10 recipes, 6 months of history); Essential at $79 per month per venue billed annually ($99 monthly), Professional at $129 billed annually ($149 monthly) with purchase orders, invoice capture by photo and cost-change alerts. One-month trial. Interface in English, languages not stated.
Counting bottles by area, matching sales to consumption and calculating a cost per cocktail are arithmetic operations on a simple database: the textbook case for a custom build in an independent bar. The difficulty starts when you want to import the till's sales automatically, read supplier invoices by photo and track price changes: that is what the Professional plan sells. If your till can export sales as CSV, an in-house tool fits in a spreadsheet and then in a small application.
What you lose
- Automatic entry of supplier invoices by photo (Professional plan).
- Sending purchase orders to suppliers.
- Alerts on changes in ingredient cost.
- The mobile counting app designed for service.
Existing alternatives to Backbar
- Bar-AssistantOpen source
Open-source bar management (MIT): bottle inventory, cocktail recipes and shopping lists, self-hosted.
- GrocyOpen source
Open-source stock management (MIT) with use-by dates, barcodes and restock alerts, designed for the home; to be adapted for a bar.
What a home-built tool costs once it exists
- Hosting and database: a server cost, and automatic backups you actually test.
- Security and GDPR: dependency updates, an HTTPS certificate, protection of your customers’ data.
- Upkeep time: who fixes the tool on a Saturday night in the middle of service if the server goes down?
The prompt to build it yourself
Build a small inventory and ingredient-cost tool for my bar, replacing a bar management subscription. Context: a 60-seat bar, about 150 items (spirits, wines, beers, soft drinks), 25 cocktails on the menu, weekly count. To do: - An item catalogue with purchase price, bottle volume, supplier, storage area. - A counting screen on a phone per area (entry in whole bottles and fractions), with history. - Recipe cards (items, doses in cl) and automatic calculation of cost per cocktail and margin from the selling price. - A weekly report: theoretical consumption (sales imported from a till CSV × doses) against actual consumption (opening stock + purchases − closing stock), with the gaps ranked. - A suggested purchase order based on a minimum level per item, exportable as PDF or email. Out of scope: automatic reading of invoices by photo, direct connection to the till. Stack: mobile web app (PWA), SQLite. README: how to run, sales CSV format, backup.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does Backbar cost, and what do you really pay for?
- Listed price: free (paid plans from €70.39/month). What the subscription covers and is hard to maintain yourself: Automatic entry of supplier invoices by photo (Professional plan).; Sending purchase orders to suppliers.; Alerts on changes in ingredient cost.; The mobile counting app designed for service..
- What free or open-source alternatives to Backbar exist?
- Bar-Assistant (open source), Grocy (open source). Options to compare before committing to a custom build.
- Where do you start to build an equivalent of Backbar?
- Copy this page’s prompt into Claude, Codex or Cursor to get a first prototype. Then plan for hosting, data backups and GDPR compliance: that is what costs the most to maintain over time.
How are our verdicts established? Read our detailed methodology ↗
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