Pub stocktaking software free trials: who gives you one without a card, and how to use the 14 days

Most "free trials" of pub stocktaking software are one of four things: a real trial with no card, a trial that takes your card and charges you on day 15 if you forget, a demo you have to book with a salesperson, or a free tier that stops just before the useful bit. Only a couple of UK-relevant tools give you the first kind. This is which is which, in a table, and how to run a two-week trial so you actually know if the thing works before the money starts.

I run a pub in Washington, Tyne and Wear, and I built StockTap, so read the table with that in mind. I've kept it to what the vendors publish on their own sites. Where they don't publish it, I've said so rather than guessed.

The four kinds of "free"

No card, time limited. You sign up with an email, you get the full product for a fixed number of days, and if you do nothing it just stops. This is the honest version. Nothing to cancel, nothing to remember.

Card up front, "cancel anytime". You get the trial but you've handed over a card, and the day it ends you're a paying customer unless you went in and cancelled. A busy licensee in the run-up to a bank holiday is exactly the person who forgets. There's a name for this on Wikipedia: the forced free trial. It works on the vendor's side because a fair chunk of people don't cancel.

Book a demo. No self-serve trial at all. You fill in a form, someone rings you, you watch a screen share, and you're quoted a price at the end of it. Fine if you're a group with a procurement process. A time sink if you're one site trying to see whether it can weigh a bottle of Bell's.

Free tier, forever. Free for good, but capped, and the cap tends to sit right in front of the feature you actually wanted. I wrote a whole piece on what free pub stocktaking software actually gets you, so I won't repeat it here.

Who offers what

So for a UK pub that wants to try before it pays, without a sales call and without a card, the shortlist is short. StockTap and Growyze publish exactly that. Backbar gives you a free tier that never ends, which is a different thing but a legitimate one. Everyone else either wants your card, your calendar, or doesn't say.

One thing worth noticing about the "not stated" cells. If a vendor doesn't tell you on the pricing page whether they'll take a card, assume they will. Nobody hides good news.

Why "no card" matters more than the number of days

Thirty days sounds better than fourteen. In practice the length barely matters, because the trial you don't start is worth nothing and the trial you start on day 26 tells you nothing. What matters is whether you can get a real count done inside it, and whether the end of it costs you money you didn't mean to spend.

A card-up-front trial changes how you behave. You're less likely to sign up in the first place, and once you have, you're trialling with a deadline hanging over you rather than looking at whether the numbers are right. A no-card trial you can just let lapse. If it was useless, you've lost an evening. If it was good, you pay.

How to run a trial that actually tells you something

Most trials get wasted. Someone signs up, pokes about for ten minutes, types in six products, never does a count, and the trial ends. Then they say "tried it, didn't get on with it", which is true but meaningless. Here's what I'd do with fourteen days.

Day one, set up your top thirty lines by value, not all four hundred. Spirits and draught first. Those thirty are where the money leaks, and thirty lines is an hour, not a weekend. Put real cost prices in, ex-VAT, off your last invoices. If you put catalogue guesses in you'll get catalogue guesses out.

Day one or two, do a full count of those thirty. Weigh the opened spirits on a kitchen scale rather than eyeballing tenths, because the whole point of the trial is to find out whether counting properly shows you something your current method doesn't. Dip the part kegs. Note the time it took. My own numbers for a 200-line site are in how long a pub stocktake takes; your thirty lines should be under the hour.

Days two to eight, trade normally. Put deliveries in as they arrive. Upload your sales, or if the tool can't take sales, note the till figures for those lines.

Day eight or nine, count the same thirty again. Now you have a variance. Not a guess, a number in pounds, per line. That number is the entire product. Does it make sense against what you already suspected? Does the draught variance look like real loss or like the 5% head allowance being counted as missing (a tool that can't tell the difference isn't worth paying for; the calibration guide explains)? And could you get this number every week without it becoming a chore?

Days nine to fourteen, do it once more if you can. One count is a photo, two is a story, three tells you if the story's true.

If you're moving off a spreadsheet, run both on the same count once and compare. I went through exactly that in switching from a spreadsheet to stocktaking software, including the rows where the spreadsheet still wins.

What to check before the trial ends

Before you let a trial roll into a payment, or lapse, a few questions that are easier to answer with the product in front of you than from a features page.

Can you export your data as a CSV right now, without asking anyone? If you can't get your numbers out during the trial, you won't be able to when you leave. What is the contract after the trial: monthly and cancel-anytime, or a year? Does it work in the cellar with no signal? Does it handle draught with calibration, or does it just ask you for a percentage? And what is the actual price for one site, in pounds, including VAT, per month? If you can't answer that last one without emailing someone, that tells you how the rest of the relationship will go.

I've put the full list, with the walk-away answers, in the buyer's checklist.

The honest bit about StockTap's trial

StockTap's trial is fourteen days, no card, full product. When it ends you can keep using a free tier or pay £39 a month, or £19 if you're one of the first fifty, which is a real price I set and not a countdown. If you did the two counts above and it didn't show you more than it costs, don't pay. I'd rather have that than a customer who forgot to cancel.

What it won't do: it won't integrate with your till automatically yet, so sales come in by upload, and it won't replace a stocktaker's judgement on a disputed audit. It will tell you every week where the pounds are going, which is the bit I couldn't get anywhere else at a price a single pub could justify.