Looking at Growyze? What £79 a month buys, what £139 adds, and the alternatives from £0 to £129

Growyze is the cheapest way to get till integration and invoice scanning on a published UK price: £79 a month for Pro, £139 a site for Premium, and a 30-day trial with no card required, which is the most generous trial on any pricing page in this market. What the barcode scanner at the heart of it can't do is tell you how much vodka is left in an open bottle. Here's where Growyze earns its money, where it doesn't, and the alternatives from a free spreadsheet to £129 flat.

Usual disclosure first. I'm a licensee in Washington, Tyne and Wear, StockTap is my product, and this page compares mine with theirs. So I'll stick to what Growyze publishes, credit what's good, and be plain about the cases where I'd point you at them rather than me. Nobody in the trade has written a Growyze alternatives page yet, just software directories listing forty products with no prices, so somebody had to.

What Growyze actually is

Going off growyze.com as of 5 September 2026: stock control for food and drink businesses, built around counts, orders and invoices. Pro is £79 a month and includes POS and accounting integration, automated invoice reconciliation on your first 30 invoices a month, and chat and email support. Premium is £139 per site and adds an admin account that manages all your sites, stock transfers between them, unlimited invoice reconciliation and a dedicated account manager. There's a Custom tier above that aimed at hotels and larger groups. Counting is done by barcode scanning and stocksheets, and they claim it cuts stocktake times by 60%. The trial is 30 days with no card, and they'll help set you up on or off site if you ask.

On till links, their integration list names Square, ICRTouch, Clover, GoEpos, Newbridge and Squirrel. That's the longest published UK till list at this price point. I went through what till integration actually moves and what it doesn't in a separate guide, so I won't repeat it all here. Short version: it moves one number, your sales by product, and that number is only as clean as your till buttons.

Three things that deserve credit

Plenty on their pages is standard issue. Three things aren't.

The first is three-way validation. Growyze checks what you ordered against what the delivery note says arrived against what the invoice charges you. Those three documents disagree more often than anyone admits, especially in a busy week when the delivery gets signed for mid-service. I've written about what delivery problems do to a stocktake, and a system that catches a short delivery before you pay the invoice is solving a real problem with real money in it.

The second is price-change alerts. Your cost prices creep, the invoice says so, and most operators never update the stock system, so every GP figure afterwards flatters the pub. It's the most common way a stock system quietly becomes fiction, and I go into it in the GP guide. Software that reads the invoice and moves the cost price on its own kills that failure at the source.

The third is the trial itself. Thirty days, no card. Long enough to run a full stocktake, trade for a month, and run a second one, which is the only trial method that tells you anything. A 14-day trial covers one count and no comparison. Mine is 14 days, so that's me told as well. Thirty lets you test the product against your own variance, and that's worth something.

What a barcode can't count

Now the question I'd want answered before £79 left my account. A barcode tells the app a bottle exists. It doesn't say how much is in it. Scanning is quick on sealed stock, cases in the cellar, unopened bottles on the shelf, and if that's most of your holding it will fly. But the money in a wet-led venue hides in the open bottles behind the bar and the kegs mid-flow, and for those Growyze's pages describe stocksheets, which means someone's eyeball and a judgement call. Maybe there's more to it in the product. Their public pages don't say, so make the demo show you an open bottle of Smirnoff going from shelf to number, and watch how much guessing is involved.

I'm biased on this and I own it: StockTap exists because I think weighing open bottles is the only count that doesn't argue with itself, and I built it after five liquor audits in eight months taught me what guessed tenths do to a variance line. Whatever you buy, mine included, the reports are downstream of the count. Get the counting method right first and the dashboards look after themselves.

Read the pricing page carefully

One small thing I noticed this week: their pricing page still footnotes unlimited invoice reconciliation on Premium as a special offer for sign-ups until 30 June 2024. That date is more than two years gone. It doesn't make anyone a cowboy, pages drift on every site and mine won't be immune, but it does tell you the web page and the contract may not be the same document. Get what your tier includes in writing before you pay, especially that 30-invoice cap on Pro. A wet-led pub on four or five drinks invoices a week will never hit it. A food-led site can sail past it in a fortnight, and then the £139 tier is the real price.

Growyze against the alternatives

Published UK pricing, checked 5 September 2026. The wider head-to-head is in the comparison hub, and the cost guide covers what the quote-only vendors tend to charge.

Growyze and the alternatives a UK operator actually shortlists, from each vendor's published pages. These change; confirm before signing.

Option	Price	Built around	Best fit
Growyze	£79 to £139 per venue	Barcode counts, invoice reconciliation, six UK till links, 30-day no-card trial	Mixed food and wet sites that want integration at the lowest published price
Jelly	£129 per location, flat	Invoice scanning, live GP, four till links	Food-led sites with heavy invoice volume; see the Jelly guide
StockLens AI	£79 to £499	AI-led scanning and insights	Operators sold on the AI angle with budget to match
StockTap	£19 (Pro), £39 (Premium)	Weight-based counting on your phone, spot checks, CSV sales in	Wet-led pubs and bars that want the count itself accurate
Spreadsheet	£0	Your own discipline	Tight single sites, until part-bottles and till mapping outgrow it

On that last row: I ran my pub on a homemade Google Sheet for years and it caught real problems. Here's when a spreadsheet stops being enough, and if yours hasn't hit those limits yet, keep your £79.

The pints arithmetic

Price every subscription in gross profit, because gross profit is what pays for it. At the Morning Advertiser's 2026 average lager price of £4.89, a pint leaves about £2.24 of GP after VAT at a 55% margin. Growyze Pro at £79 a month needs roughly 8 pints of GP a week before it has saved you anything. Premium at £139 needs about 14. Jelly needs 13, StockTap Pro needs 2, the spreadsheet needs none. None of those numbers settles the argument on its own. A system that catches one short delivery a month can clear its own cost, and my worst audit found a £756 hole in one period, so the stakes are real. The point is to know your number and make the software earn it. The full payback method is in the ROI guide.

So who should actually buy Growyze?

Straight answer. If you run a mixed food and wet site or a small group, you sit on one of their six tills, your invoice volume is real, and you want reconciliation plus integration at the lowest published price in the market, Growyze is a credible buy and the 30-day trial costs you nothing but effort. Use the trial properly: full count at the start, full count at the end, compare the variance to what your current method says.

If you're wet-led and single-site, be honest about which problem you have. Your invoice volume is small, your till is probably already mapped, and your losses live in open bottles, lines and short measures. That's a counting problem before it's a paperwork problem, and you can buy an accurate count for £19, or start free on a spreadsheet and feel the limits yourself. Whatever lands on the shortlist, take the buyer's checklist questions into the demo, and make every vendor count an open bottle in front of you.

Common questions

How much does Growyze cost in the UK?

£79 a month for the Pro tier and £139 per site a month for Premium, on Growyze's published pricing as of 5 September 2026, with a Custom tier for hotels and larger groups. Pro caps automated invoice reconciliation at 30 invoices a month; Premium is unlimited. Confirm current terms with the vendor before signing.

Does Growyze have a free trial?

Yes, 30 days with no card required, on their published pages as of September 2026. That's the most generous trial in the UK market and long enough to run two full stocktakes with a month's trading between them, which is the only trial method that really tests stock software.

How does Growyze count stock?

By barcode scanning and stocksheets, per their published pages. Scanning is fast on sealed stock. Their pages don't set out a method for part-used bottles beyond stocksheets, so if you're wet-led, ask in the demo exactly how an open bottle gets to a number.

Growyze or Jelly?

On published pages: Growyze is cheaper at entry (£79 against £129), lists six UK till integrations against Jelly's four, and has the longer trial. Jelly's flat price includes unlimited invoice scanning where Growyze Pro caps reconciliation at 30 a month. Food-led with heavy invoices leans Jelly; integration on a budget leans Growyze; wet-led should ask both the open-bottle question first.

What are the main Growyze alternatives for a UK venue?

Jelly at £129 a location flat, StockLens AI from £79 a month, StockTap at £19 a month with weight-based counting for wet-led sites, and a well-built spreadsheet at £0. Quote-only enterprise tools like Craftable and Kitchen Cut sit above all of these.