ShelfCount vs WISK: bottle scales for bars, or a flat $50 for a cafe
WISK weighs your open liquor bottles on a Bluetooth scale. Clever answer to a hard problem, and not the problem we set out to solve. The price gap is large and the fit question turns out to be easy, so this one is a short read.
The price, side by side
| ShelfCount | WISK | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price, one venue | $50/mo flat, everything included | $249/mo for beverage only, or $249/mo for food only |
| Food and beverage together | $50/mo. There is one plan | $399/mo bundle |
| Two or three venues | $50/mo. Locations are unlimited | $499/mo, or $799 for the bundle |
| Eight to ten venues | $50/mo | $1,250/mo, or $1,999 for the bundle |
| One-time implementation fee | None | $750 for a single venue, $1,250 for the bundle, rising to from $7,500 at enterprise |
| Free trial | 14 days. Card at signup, nothing charged | None. A 60-day money-back guarantee instead |
| Billing term | Month to month, cancel in the app | Quarterly or annual. Annual is advertised at 17% off, and the rate is locked for the term you sign |
| How you buy it | Sign up on the site | Book a demo, or watch a 20-minute recorded one |
WISK figures from wisk.ai/price, checked Aug 2026. Capterra lists a CA$29/mo flat-rate starting price for WISK, which does not resemble their own published pricing at all and looks like stale aggregator data. We use WISK's page. Prices change, so check theirs before you sign.
Year one on WISK, single venue, food only: $2,988 in subscription plus the $750 implementation fee, so about $3,700. Year one on ShelfCount: $600, and the first fourteen days of that are free. The implementation fee is the part people miss when they compare monthly numbers, which is why it gets its own row.
What each one actually does
| ShelfCount | WISK | |
|---|---|---|
| Weighing partial bottles | Not offered, and not planned | Bluetooth scales. This is their flagship feature |
| Barcode scanning | Not yet | Yes, through the phone camera |
| Counting on a phone | A browser link. Nothing to install | Yes |
| Offline counting | Not yet | They advertise "reliable offline capabilities" |
| Recipes and prep recipes | Nested food and drink recipes that recost when a price moves | Yes, plus a liquor cost calculator that matches POS items to recipes |
| Theoretical vs actual | Yes | Yes, their Actual vs Theoretical report |
| Invoice scanning | Software parses it, you approve every price change | Automated invoice processing, which they describe as "a unique blend of human expertise and technology" |
| Purchase orders from par levels | Yes, emailed to the vendor | Yes, automated ordering driven by sales |
| Waste tracking | On the one plan | Yes, through the variance report |
| Prebuilt product catalog | None. You upload your own item list | They claim 200,000 bottles and 1.5 million ingredients |
| POS sales sync | Square and Clover. Toast is in certification | They advertise 60+ POS integrations |
| Accounting sync | Not yet. You export CSV | QuickBooks Online is named. Nothing else confirmed on their pages |
| Multi-unit rollup reporting | Not yet. Built for independents | Yes. Multi-outlet and enterprise tiers, plus a central stockroom |
| Team members included | Unlimited | Not published. Their pricing counts outlets, not seats |
WISK cells come from wisk.ai's pricing, product and comparison pages, checked Aug 2026. Where a claim is theirs about themselves, it is written as their claim.
Where WISK is ahead
Pour cost is the hardest inventory problem in hospitality, because a half-empty bottle isn’t a countable thing. Everyone else asks a bartender to eyeball it in tenths on a Sunday night. WISK puts it on a scale. If the money leaking out of your business is liquor, that one difference decides the whole question, and nothing we do substitutes for it.
They also carry a beverage catalog we can’t match. They claim over 200,000 bottles, so adding a new gin is a search rather than a data-entry job. Add barcode scanning, an advertised offline mode, more than sixty POS integrations, and pricing tiers built for groups running up to ten outlets. Their case studies quote operators cutting inventory from two hours to twenty minutes.
One thing I should say out loud
When we checked in August 2026, WISK had no reviews at all on Capterra, and a search-indexed snapshot of their G2 page showed two. Those are almost no reviews, which is a very different claim from bad reviews, and on a page like this it’s easy to imply one while technically saying the other. I’m also in no position to throw that stone. We’re younger than they are and our own review record is thin. Judge both of us on the product in front of you, which is one more argument for trials and demos you can open yourself.
Where we went the other way
Coffee shops leak margin through modifiers rather than open bottles. Oat milk instead of whole, an extra shot, three pumps of vanilla: each one moves the cost of a drink by a few cents, and none of it shows up unless something is costing those modifiers as they sell. That engine is the piece of ShelfCount that got the most work, because it’s the piece my own shop needed.
The commercial side is simpler too. No implementation fee, no quarterly or annual term to sign, no demo to sit through, one price with every feature in it. If you decide in week three that it isn’t for you, you cancel in the app and that’s the end of it.
Who WISK is right for
- Bars, nightclubs, and anywhere with a wall of open bottles
- Anyone who wants weight-based counts instead of eyeballed tenths
- Groups running several outlets, or a central stockroom
- A POS that isn’t Square or Clover
- Operators fine with a setup fee and a quarterly or annual commitment
Who ShelfCount is right for
- Coffee shops and food-led independents
- A beer and wine list short enough to count by the bottle
- Anyone who wants the whole product for $50 and no setup fee
- Square or Clover on the counter
- People who want to try it this afternoon rather than book something
So which one
Liquor-heavy bar: WISK, and the scales earn their money. Cafe, bakery, or a food-led restaurant with a modest bar: you’d be paying for a weighing workflow nobody on your team will ever open.
Questions people actually ask
- How much does WISK cost?
- Their published price for a single venue was $249 a month for beverage only or $249 for food only when we checked in August 2026, with the food-and-beverage bundle at $399. Multi-outlet pricing climbs from $499 to $1,999 a month depending on outlet count and bundle. On top of the subscription there is a one-time implementation fee: $750 for a single venue, $1,250 for the bundle, up to from $7,500 at the enterprise tier. Billing is quarterly or annual, and annual is advertised at 17% off.
- Does WISK have a free trial?
- No. Their pricing page states there is no free trial and offers a 60-day money-back guarantee instead, and buying runs through a booked demo. There is a 20-minute recorded demo you can watch without booking. ShelfCount's trial is 14 days with a card at signup and nothing charged until it ends.
- Does ShelfCount weigh bottles?
- No, and there's no scale integration planned. ShelfCount counts in whatever units you set up, so a part-used bottle is whatever you tell it. If measuring open liquor precisely is the reason you're shopping, that's the thing WISK built and we didn't.
- Is ShelfCount any good for a bar?
- For beer, wine, canned and bottled stock, and unopened spirits, it works the same way it does for food. For a heavy cocktail program with a lot of open bottles behind the bar, a weight-based system will give you a truer number than counting will, and WISK is one of the products that does that.
- Which POS systems does ShelfCount work with?
- Square and Clover today. Toast is built and in certification, which isn't the same as live. Without a connected POS you still get counts, recipes, purchasing and waste, but theoretical vs actual needs sales data to compare against.
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.
- WISK pricing page — https://www.wisk.ai/price (checked Aug 2026)
- WISK bar inventory management page — https://www.wisk.ai/bar-inventory-management-software (checked Aug 2026)
- WISK's own comparison page against MarketMan — https://www.wisk.ai/vs/wisk-vs-marketman (checked Aug 2026)
- WISK on-demand demo page — https://www.wisk.ai/demo-on-demand (checked Aug 2026)
- WISK on Capterra — https://www.capterra.com/p/187497/WISK-ai/ (checked Aug 2026)
- WISK on G2 (search-indexed snapshot; G2 blocks automated fetches) — https://www.g2.com/products/wisk/reviews (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.