Counting bottles shouldn’t
cost you a shift’s tips.
This is the honest version of why Open Source Barware exists, who it’s for, and why the whole program — bar, liquor, and wine inventory included — is free and stays free.
Inventory has been a paid problem for decades.
Somewhere along the way, an industry decided that counting your own bottles was worth charging you for. We’ve seen the invoices. Three of them show up again and again.
The Gun
$3,000+
Handheld inventory scanners that still need someone to walk the room and point them at every bottle.
The Subscription
$200+ / mo
SaaS platforms billing every month, forever, for a spreadsheet with a nicer font.
The Consultant
By the bottle
Inventory services that charge a fee to come count what your own staff already knows how to count.
AI made it possible to build this without a dev team or a funding round.
We’re not going to pretend otherwise: this program was built with AI, by people who work behind bars, not by a startup with a Series A. That’s the whole point. The tools that used to require a company — and a reason to charge you — are now buildable by the people who actually live the problem every close.
Here’s the part worth saying plainly, though: we built it with AI, but you don’t need any to run it.The program does the whole job right on your laptop — walk, count, reconcile, Process, spreadsheets — on its own, offline, for free. The only optional AI is a small shortcut that reads invoice photos so you don’t have to type them. Skip it and nothing breaks.
So instead of pitching investors on a subscription model, we just built the thing and gave it away.
Free isn’t a launch price. It’s the whole model.
- —No investors to answer to, so no pressure to add a paywall later.
- —No email capture on the download — the program does not need your address to work.
- —No seat limits, no location limits, no “upgrade to Pro” screen hiding behind a feature you already need.
- —Open source, so if we ever drifted from this, anyone could see it in the code and fork it.
“We didn’t build a company that sells software to bars. We built the spreadsheet we wished someone had handed us on a bad Monday close.”
— Open Source Barware
What We Ask Instead
No purchase required. If you want to say thanks, we’ll take it two ways.
Tell us what’s missing — a feature, a bad assumption, a step that doesn’t match how your bar actually runs. Or, if the program saved you a night, buy us a drink. Every donation keeps it alive, open, and free for the next bar.
Where To Go From Here
One program. Every category behind the bar.
Free Liquor Inventory
How the program handles your highest-cost, highest-risk category.
Open liquor inventory →Free Wine Inventory
Vintages, bins, and bottle-level tracking for your wine program.
Open wine inventory →The Process
The kitchen-table walkthrough of how setup and weekly counts work.
Read the process →Read the manifesto. Now go count something.
No signup. No email capture. No sales pitch. Download the program and get to work.
Download Program — free v1.5