About us

I own Stella Coffee, an independent shop in Los Angeles. ShelfCount exists because I needed it behind my own bar. It ran in one cafe long before it was something anyone else could buy.

What I found when I went shopping

A few years into running the shop I was doing inventory the way most independents do it: a spreadsheet, counted late, read monthly, wrong by the time anyone looked at it. So I went to buy something better. MarketMan’s published Starter price was $249 a month. Everything else in the category wanted a demo call before it would tell me a price at all, and the quotes that eventually arrived were built for restaurant groups with a controller on staff.

I had one location and a walk-in full of milk. None of it was priced for me, and a fair amount of it wasn’t designed for me either. Restaurant inventory software assumes plates. A cafe is modifiers all the way down.

So I built the thing I needed

Four features, because those were the four my shop actually used:

• Counts on a phone, in walk order, so the closing barista can do the bar during a lull instead of scheduling an event around it.
• Invoice scanning that is review-first. A person approves every price and pack-size change before it touches a cost, no matter how confident the scan is.
• Recipe costing that understands pack sizes, so a case price moving flows through every drink built on that item, including the prep recipes in between.
• POS-synced theoretical vs. actual COGS: what the sales say you should have used, next to what the shelves say actually left.

Stella has run on it every day since. I don’t offer that as a testimonial. It’s the development process: when something is broken I find out on a Sunday night, phone in hand, count half finished. It’s a fast way to learn what matters.

Stella is an ordinary customer account on the platform now. Same code, same limits, nothing special-cased for the shop that started it.

Why the price is on the page

$50 a month, flat, month to month, and you can sign up without talking to anybody. Every feature is in it.

It isn’t an introductory rate. Demo-gated pricing makes sense when every deal is negotiated, which is what selling to chains looks like. Pointed at a one-location cafe comparing options at 11pm, it just means you can’t find out whether you can afford to know your food cost without first getting on a call about it. An independent shouldn’t have to do that. If you’d rather hand off the setup, the done-for-you migration is a one-time $299, and that number is published too.

What we don’t do

Multi-unit enterprise reporting isn’t here. If you run eight locations and need consolidated rollups across them, ShelfCount isn’t your tool yet. Toast is built but still sitting in certification, so it isn’t live. There are places where the incumbents genuinely do more than we do, and there are shops small enough that a spreadsheet is the right answer and buying anything would be a waste of your money.

We put all of that on the comparison pages instead of burying it. It costs us signups. It also saves both of us a trial that was never going to end well, and I’d rather have the second thing.

Where to go from here

The whole price is on the pricing page. If you run a cafe, the coffee shops page covers drink costing, modifiers, and the milk problem in cafe terms. The comparison pages go through the alternatives, including a spreadsheet and the places where the other tools win. And the blog is where I write up how we actually run counts, pars, and COGS at Stella.

To try it on your own shelves, the 14-day trial is the whole product with nothing held back. If you’d rather poke at someone else’s data first, there’s a demo cafe you can open without signing up.

The founder of ShelfCount, owner of Stella Coffee