Bar Patrol alternative for a UK pub: what you get, what you don’t

Bar Patrol is a proper bar inventory app with a real following in the States, and if I ran a cocktail bar in Texas I'd probably use it. But I checked their pricing page again this morning and the facts for a UK pub are these: it bills in dollars, it counts in hundredths of an ounce, and there is no free trial at all. Their own refund policy says you'll be charged one month even if you cancel. Here's the honest comparison for a UK licensee.

What Bar Patrol actually is

A weighing-led inventory app for bars, on iOS and Android. You buy their Bluetooth scale for a one-off $129, put each open bottle on it, and the app turns the weight into ounces remaining and a valuation. There's a point-count option for full bottles and kegs, you upload sales data from your POS, and it shows losses down to a hundredth of an ounce. The speed pitch is the core of their marketing and, to be fair, weighing really is faster and more accurate than eyeballing tenths. It's the same conviction StockTap is built on.

The pricing, checked 14 September 2026

The dollar prices matter more than they look. Your card converts $69 at whatever rate your bank feels like that morning, plus a non-sterling transaction fee on most business cards, and the amount leaving the account moves month to month. Small thing, annoying forever.

Where it doesn't fit a UK pub

Ounces. Bar Patrol thinks in fluid ounces because American bars pour in them. Your world is 25ml and 35ml measures, 125ml and 175ml wine, pints and halves through the font. Everything Bar Patrol tells you needs mentally converting back before you can act on it, and your spirit measures thumb their nose at a report in ounces.

Draught. A US bar's draught wall is sixth barrels and half barrels. A UK pub cellar is 50 litre kegs, 30s, elevens and firkins, some of it cask with sediment and a settling timetable. Point-counting a keg tells you it exists. It doesn't tell you the 88-pint keg really yields 84, which is where UK draught GP% actually lives. Keg and cask calibration is the whole game here.

The trading numbers. No VAT handling, no ex-VAT GP convention, no UK duty context. A US app reporting "pour cost" is answering a different exam question to a UK stocktake report, and if you then feed those numbers into a GP conversation with your accountant you're in three-definitions-of-GP territory immediately.

The trial. This one's simple. Their own pricing page says there's no free trial period and you'll be charged one month at the monthly rate regardless. I think that's a strange way to sell software in 2026. You shouldn't have to pay $69 to find out whether an app suits your bar.

What StockTap doesn't do, so you're comparing straight

StockTap won't pull sales from your till automatically yet. You import sales, or type takings in, and the EPOS integration guide explains the honest state of that. There's no recipe costing for a cocktail-led list, which is a real Bar Patrol strength if premixed cocktails are your business. And it's newer, built by one licensee and used hardest in UK pubs, not a decade-old US product. If those trade-offs cut against you, Bar Patrol or one of the others in the best-of roundup may fit better, and I'd rather you picked right than picked mine.

Who should pick which

Pick Bar Patrol if you're running an American-style cocktail bar, you pour in ounces, your sales data lives in a US POS, and a $129 scale plus $49 a month reads as reasonable against your spirits holding. It's a competent product for exactly that bar.

Pick StockTap if you're a UK pub, bar or club counting in ml and pints, you want the weighing method without importing a scale from America, you'd like your GP% to arrive ex VAT the way your accountant and your stocktaker expect it, and you want to try the thing properly before any money moves. Fourteen days, no card, count your actual bar twice and look at the variance between the two. That test costs nothing and tells you more than any comparison table, including this one. The wider field is in the full software comparison hub and what pub stocktaking software costs.