ShelfCount vs Craftable: an enterprise hospitality suite, or a tool for one shop
Craftable sells to hotels, casinos and restaurant groups. We sell to the person who is also the one counting the walk-in on a Sunday night. That is most of the comparison right there, but pricing is the question people arrive with, so we start there.
The price, as far as anyone can tell
| ShelfCount | Craftable | |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | $50/mo flat, printed on our pricing page | Does not publish pricing. craftable.com/pricing returns a 404 |
| What review sites report | Same as the site. There is one number | GetApp lists a starting price of $99 per user per month |
| Pricing model | One plan. Team members and locations unlimited | Quoted after a demo. GetApp's figure implies per-seat |
| Free trial | 14 days. Card at signup, nothing charged | None. GetApp and Capterra both list no free trial and no free version |
| How you buy it | Sign up on the site | Book a demo |
| Contract length | Month to month, cancel in the app | Not published anywhere we could find |
Craftable publishes no pricing, so there is no vendor figure to quote. The $99-per-user number is GetApp's report, not Craftable's statement, and we flag it as such rather than treating it as fact. Taken at face value it would mean four logins cost $396 a month against our $50, but it is an aggregator's number and it may be stale.
Sit with that row for a second. Say four people need a login: a manager, two shift leads, you. A per-seat model reprices that every time you hire. Ours has no seat count in it at all. Whether Craftable would actually quote you $99 a head is a question only their sales team can answer, which is the whole point of the row above.
What Craftable actually is
Five pieces, in their own framing: Intelligent Ordering, AP Automation, Inventory and Recipe Management, Daily Actionable Insights, and Craftable AI. It’s one of the older platforms in the category. FNBTech has been building it since 2015, it carries a private-equity investment from Gauge Capital in 2023, and the homepage claims more than 10,000 operators. The Bevager and Foodager names you may remember for bar and kitchen look like they’ve been folded into the single Craftable brand.
What each one actually does
| ShelfCount | Craftable | |
|---|---|---|
| Counting on a phone | A browser link. Nothing to install | Mobile app with barcode scanning |
| Recipes and plate costing | Nested prep recipes that recost when a price moves | Real-time ingredient pricing, plate cost, menu engineering, price and portion simulation |
| Theoretical vs actual COGS | Yes | Yes |
| Invoice processing | Parsed, then held for your approval before any cost changes | AP Automation, marketed as Invoice AI |
| Purchase orders from par levels | Yes, emailed to the vendor | Intelligent Ordering, including automatic POs at par |
| In-product AI assistant | No. AI reads receipts; a person approves what it read | Yes, marketed as Crafty and Operator AI |
| POS sales sync | Square and Clover. Toast is in certification | 38 named POS systems including Toast, Square, Clover, Micros/Oracle and Aloha |
| Accounting and ERP sync | Not yet. You export CSV | QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Bill.com and others |
| Multi-unit rollup reporting | Not yet. Built for independents | Yes. Multi-store controls and multi-location profit comparison |
| Hotels, resorts and casinos | Not our market | A named target market |
| Bar and beverage depth | Beer, wine and unopened stock count like anything else | A long-standing strength; the product grew out of a bar-focused brand |
| Team members included | Unlimited | Not published. The reported pricing is quoted per user |
| Who is behind it | One restaurant owner in Los Angeles, running his own shop on it | FNBTech, Inc., claiming 10,000+ operators and 10+ years, PE-backed since 2023 |
Craftable cells come from craftable.com's own pages plus its GetApp and Capterra listings, checked Aug 2026. Their homepage also claims 1,000+ POS, EDI and API integrations; the 38 above are the ones actually named on their integrations page, which is the number we can verify.
Where Craftable is ahead
Reach. Sage Intacct, NetSuite, Acumatica and Microsoft Dynamics GP are integrations no single-location cafe has ever needed, and exactly what a hotel group’s controller asks about on the first call. Add multi-store inventory controls, multi-location profit comparison, a bar heritage going back a decade, and 38 named POS systems against our two.
Their Capterra reviewers single out the US Foods invoice integration and the vendor price reporting as the parts that earn their keep. The same reviewers are candid about what that breadth costs: POS mapping for bar operations described as counter-intuitive, recipe customisation that gets complex, implementation that takes real time, invoice auto-mapping that occasionally assigns a product to the wrong place. That’s the normal tax on a platform this wide. Budget for it.
Where we went the other way
We publish the price. That isn’t a marketing stance. When I was shopping for this myself, half the category made me book a call to find out whether I could afford them, and every one of those calls was an hour I didn’t have. Ours is $50. You just read it.
After that it’s the same set of trade-offs as everywhere else on this site. One plan, every feature in it, as many logins as you need. Counts happen in a browser on whatever phone your closer already carries. Receipt scanning parses the invoice and then waits: no price change lands without a person approving it. And the demo is a button rather than a calendar invite.
Who Craftable is right for
- Hotels, resorts, casinos and multi-venue hospitality groups
- Anyone whose accounting is an ERP rather than QuickBooks
- A serious bar program running across several venues
- Operations with somebody whose job includes owning the system
Who ShelfCount is right for
- One location, or two you're happy to look at separately
- Owners who want to see the price before they see a salesperson
- Teams where everyone should have a login without that costing more
- Square or Clover on the counter
- Coffee shops in particular. That’s the shop this was built in
Questions people actually ask
- How much does Craftable cost?
- They don't say. There's no pricing page at all: craftable.com/pricing returned a 404 when we checked in August 2026, and every path on the site is a demo booking. GetApp reports a starting price of $99 per user per month with no free trial, and a G2 snippet showed a figure in the same range, but Craftable has never published either. Treat $99 per user as an aggregator's report rather than a quote; real pricing comes after a demo.
- Does Craftable have a free trial?
- Not one anyone publishes. GetApp and Capterra both list no free trial and no free version, and the site's only call to action is a demo booking. ShelfCount's trial is 14 days: card at signup, nothing charged until it ends, cancel in one click.
- What are Bevager and Foodager?
- Legacy sub-brand names that Craftable used to market separately: Bevager for bar, Foodager for kitchen, House for hotel. Their current site uses only the Craftable name and the pages we checked no longer surface those brands. Whether they still appear inside the product itself, we can't tell from the outside.
- Does ShelfCount work for a hotel or a restaurant group?
- Not today. Multi-unit rollup reporting isn't built, and hotels aren't a market we've designed for at all. ShelfCount fits one location, or a couple you're happy to look at separately. If you need one view across a portfolio, Craftable is aimed squarely at that and we aren't.
- Why is ShelfCount so much cheaper?
- Because it does less, deliberately, and because nobody has to sell it to you. No sales team, no per-seat pricing, no ERP integration work, no hotel module. It's the set of features one coffee shop actually used, built by the person who owns it.
Compare something else
Sources
Every figure above about another company came from its own public pages on the date listed. Prices move; if one of these is stale, email us and we’ll fix the page.
- Craftable homepage — https://craftable.com (checked Aug 2026)
- Craftable inventory page — https://craftable.com/inventory (checked Aug 2026)
- Craftable integrations page — https://craftable.com/integrations (checked Aug 2026)
- Craftable pricing URL, which returns HTTP 404 — https://craftable.com/pricing (checked Aug 2026)
- Craftable pricing as reported by GetApp — https://www.getapp.com/retail-consumer-services-software/a/craftable/pricing/ (checked Aug 2026)
- Craftable on Capterra — https://www.capterra.com/p/200434/Craftable/ (checked Aug 2026)
- Gauge Capital investment announcement — https://gaugecapital.com/news-article/gauge-capital-announces-strategic-investment-in-craftable (checked Aug 2026)
You don’t have to book a call to see this one. The demo is the real product with a cafe’s data already in it. Open it, poke around, close the tab.