Looking at Jelly for your pub? What £129 a month buys, and the alternatives from £0 to £139

Jelly charges £129 a month per location, flat, and for that you get invoice scanning that watches your cost prices, live GP figures, weekly variance reports and native links to four tills. For a food-led site drowning in supplier invoices, that's a fair offer. For a wet-led pub with one bar and a cellar, it's £1,548 a year wrapped around a count it still needs you to do. Here's what Jelly does well, the questions its own pages don't answer, and the alternatives from a free spreadsheet to £139 a month.

First, cards on the table. I run a pub in Washington, Tyne and Wear, and StockTap is mine, so I'm a competitor writing about a competitor. I'll stick to what Jelly publishes, I'll say what it's good at, and where I'd send you somewhere other than my own product, I will. Jelly's content team writes more about UK stock control than anyone else in this market, so if you're researching this subject you've probably already read them. This is the page they haven't written: the case for and against paying their invoice.

What Jelly actually is

Going off Jelly's own pages as of September 2026: it's stock management built around the paperwork rather than the shelf. Its lead features are invoice scanning that captures cost prices as they change and flags price rises, live gross profit tracking, weekly variance reporting, and a dashboard that rolls sites up for groups. It connects natively to Square, Epos Now, Lightspeed and Toast, and Jelly says a connection takes about five minutes to set up. Pricing is £129 per location per month with no per-user or per-feature extras.

That flat price deserves credit. Half this market hides pricing behind a demo, and I've written before about what the quote-only vendors actually charge. A number on the website is a small act of respect for the buyer, and £129 sits mid-table: more than Growyze's entry tier at £79, a fraction of MarginEdge's $350.

The strongest thing about it, and it isn't the dashboard

Cost price creep is real money. Your lager cost goes up 40p a keg in February when the duty moves, the invoice says so, and most pubs never re-price the stock system, so every GP figure after that is quietly wrong. I bang on about this in the GP guide because it's the most common way a pub flatters itself. Software that reads the invoice and updates the cost price on its own attacks that problem at the source. If you're food-led, with forty supplier invoices a week and menus costed to the gram, that feature alone can justify the fee.

A wet-led pub gets maybe four or five drinks invoices a week, mostly from one supplier, and half the lines never change price. The same feature exists, it's just solving a much smaller problem. That's not a criticism of Jelly. It's a question of what building you're standing in.

The question their pages don't answer

Here's what I'd want answered before £129 left my account: how do I count an open bottle of vodka on a Sunday night? Jelly's pages, as of this week, talk about invoices, GP and variance. They don't set out a physical counting method for part-used stock. Maybe it's tenths, maybe it's something better; their site doesn't say, so ask in the demo and watch the answer happen on a real bottle.

I'm biased here and I'll own it: StockTap exists because I think weighing is the only way to count an open bottle without guessing, and eyeballing tenths is how variance reports end up fiction. Whatever software you pick, mine included, the variance is only ever as good as the count that feeds it. Integration, dashboards, scanned invoices, the lot: it's all downstream of one person in a cellar with a number to write down. Get that answer first, then argue about features.

Jelly against the alternatives

Published UK pricing, checked August and September 2026. The full head-to-head across more vendors is in the comparison hub.

Jelly and the main alternatives a UK pub actually shortlists, from each vendor's published pages. Confirm before signing; these change.

Option	Price	Built around	Best fit
Jelly	£129 per location	Invoice scanning, live GP, four till links	Food-led sites and small groups with heavy invoice volume
Growyze	£79 to £139 per venue	Stock counts, invoices, links to six UK tills, 30-day no-card trial	Sites that want till integration at a lower entry price
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 an accurate count first
Spreadsheet	£0	Your own discipline	Tight single sites; see below before you sneer

On the spreadsheet row: I ran my pub on a homemade Google Sheet for years and it caught real problems. If money's tight, a good sheet beats no counting, and I've written a straight guide to when a spreadsheet stops being enough. Don't let any vendor, me included, tell you £0 can't work. It works right up until part-bottles, till mapping and time make it lie to you.

The pints arithmetic

Price any subscription in gross profit, because that's what pays for it. At the Morning Advertiser's 2026 average lager price of £4.89, a pint leaves about £2.24 of GP behind after VAT at a 55% margin. Jelly at £129 a month needs roughly 13 pints of GP a week before it has saved you a penny. Growyze's entry tier needs about 8. StockTap Pro needs 2. None of those numbers is damning on its own, software that finds a £756 hole pays for itself many times over, and I know the size of hole an audit can find because I've had one. The point is to know your number, and to make the software earn it. The payback method is in the ROI guide.

So who should actually buy Jelly?

Straight answer. If you run a food-led operation or a small group, live on supplier invoices, use one of the four tills they connect to, and want cost prices maintained without anyone typing, Jelly is a credible buy at a published price, and you could do far worse. If you're wet-led and single-site, the job is an accurate count, done often, and £129 a month is paying for machinery around the edges of it. Try the count first. Weigh your spirits for a month, spot-check the top twenty lines weekly, and see what the variance says. That habit costs £19 with me, £0 on a spreadsheet, and it's the part every vendor on that table, Jelly included, is downstream of.

Whatever you shortlist, take the buyer's checklist questions into the demo, and make every vendor show you an open bottle being counted before you talk contracts.

Common questions

How much does Jelly cost in the UK?

£129 per location per month, flat, with no per-user or per-feature charges, according to Jelly's own published pages as of September 2026. That's £1,548 a year for a single site. Always confirm current pricing with the vendor before signing.

What is Jelly stock management good at?

On its published pages: invoice scanning that captures cost price changes and flags price rises, live GP figures, weekly variance reporting, a multi-site dashboard, and native till links to Square, Epos Now, Lightspeed and Toast. The flat price is also easy to budget. It reads as strongest for food-led and multi-outlet operations where invoice volume is high.

Does Jelly do weight-based stocktaking?

Its published pages, as of September 2026, describe invoice automation, GP tracking and variance reporting, and don't set out a physical counting method for part-used bottles. If you're wet-led, ask in the demo exactly how an open bottle of vodka gets counted, because that answer decides how accurate your variance can ever be.

What are the main Jelly alternatives for a UK pub?

Growyze at £79 to £139 a venue with a longer list of UK till integrations and a 30-day no-card trial; StockLens AI from £79 a month at the entry tier; StockTap at £19 a month with weight-based counting on your phone; and a well-built spreadsheet at £0, which is where plenty of tight wet-led pubs should start.

Should a wet-led pub pay £129 a month for stock software?

Only if the features that justify it get used. £129 a month at a 55% GP on an average-priced lager is about 13 pints of gross profit a week before the software has saved you anything. If your operation is one bar, a cellar and mostly wet sales, the job is counting accurately and often, and you can buy that for a lot less than £1,548 a year.