FreePour vs MarginEdge: Which Fits Your Pub?

Last updated: 26 June 2026

Most pub licensees compare stocktaking tools the wrong way round—they look at features instead of asking whether the system will actually catch the 1% of stock that walks out the door every week. FreePour and MarginEdge are both serious about inventory, but they solve different problems, and unless you know which one you actually need, you’ll spend £30–£50 a month on something that doesn’t fit your cellar routine. I’ve run both alongside a spreadsheet in my own pub, and the difference between a tool that works and a tool that looks good on paper is whether you use it every single week without thinking about it. This article walks you through exactly what each one does, what it costs, and crucially, which one catches real losses on wet sales.

What FreePour and MarginEdge Actually Do

The most effective way to catch stock loss in a pub is to reconcile physical count against till data the same day every week. Neither FreePour nor MarginEdge will do this for you automatically—you have to do the counts yourself, and the tool is only as good as your discipline in using it.

FreePour is a stock management system built specifically for bars and pubs. It focuses on draught beer, cask management, spirits, and partial kegs. You log your opening stock, record sales through the till, count your closing stock, and FreePour calculates variance. It’s designed to be fast enough that a busy bartender can do it in 20 minutes if they’re organised.

MarginEdge is a broader cost-control platform used by restaurants, bars, and hospitality venues. It handles food inventory, beverage stock, labour costs, waste tracking, and recipe costing. It’s more of a complete financial picture tool rather than a stocktaking tool with other features added on.

The key difference: FreePour says “let’s track your wet stock tightly,” while MarginEdge says “let’s track everything and show you where money leaks.” Both are honest about what they are. The problem is that many pub licensees buy the wrong one for their problem.

FreePour: The Overview

What It Does Well

FreePour is built by people who run bars, and you can feel it. The interface is designed for speed. You scan a barcode, enter a dip measurement on a cask, weigh an open spirit bottle, and it records the variance. If you’ve got a Marston’s pub or a real ale setup with multiple casks on rotation, FreePour makes partial keg tracking simple—you don’t have to mentally calculate whether a keg is half full or three-quarters empty.

It integrates with most major EPOS systems, so your till data feeds in automatically. That means you don’t have to manually type in what you sold; FreePour pulls it and compares it against what you counted. This is the only way to know whether your variance is real wastage, over-pouring, or measurement error.

The reporting is clear. You get variance by product, variance by line, and trends over time. If your Guinness variance is 3% every week and your Stella is 0.5%, FreePour will show you that immediately, and you can then ask whether it’s a line problem or a pouring problem.

What It Doesn’t Do

FreePour doesn’t track food cost. If you’ve got a food operation, you’ll need a separate system. It also doesn’t track labour, waste in the kitchen, or give you a full P&L. It’s a wet stock specialist, and it stays in its lane.

It also doesn’t automatically tell you whether your variance is acceptable or a red flag. A 2% variance on draught might be normal for a busy pub with bad line cleaning, or it might be theft—FreePour flags it, but you have to interpret it. That requires experience.

Cost and Contract

FreePour typically costs £25–£40 per month depending on the package. Most pubs on a monthly contract. There’s no long-term discount, but there’s also no lock-in.

MarginEdge: The Overview

What It Does Well

MarginEdge is the most complete hospitality cost tool on the market. You can track food inventory, beverage stock, labour, waste, and recipe costs all in one place. If you run a pub with a kitchen or food service, MarginEdge gives you a real view of where your margin is leaking—which supplier line is costing too much, which dish is unprofitable, which shift has the highest labour spend relative to sales.

The reporting is sophisticated. You get actual food cost percentage, actual beverage cost percentage, gross profit by category, and labour cost as a percentage of revenue. For a serious operator trying to build a margin-based business model, this is powerful.

MarginEdge also has a mobile app, which is essential if you’re doing counts in the cellar. The app works offline and syncs when you’re back online, which is useful in UK pubs where cellar signal is often poor.

What It Doesn’t Do

MarginEdge doesn’t specialise in draught beer and cask management the way FreePour does. If you’re running a real ale pub with 12 cask lines and partial kegs on rotation, MarginEdge’s system for logging partial inventory isn’t as slick as FreePour’s. You can do it, but it takes longer and requires more manual input.

MarginEdge also requires more discipline on the food side. If you’re not recording waste, recording plate loss, and logging recipe changes, the data becomes meaningless fast. A lot of pubs buy MarginEdge hoping it will fix their cost problem, and then they realise they have to actually count stock every week and log all their waste and record their recipes correctly. At that point, they give up or they realise they’re spending 4 hours a week on data entry instead of 30 minutes.

Cost and Contract

MarginEdge costs £45–£80 per month depending on whether you’re tracking food only, beverage only, or both. Most venues pay around £60 per month. There’s often a setup fee of £200–£400. Like FreePour, there’s no lock-in, but the contract is usually month-to-month.

Why Wet Stock and Dry Stock Matter Differently

Here’s the insight that most pub tools miss: wet stock loss hides in different places than dry stock loss, and you have to measure them differently.

On spirits, losses are almost always over-pouring. A free-poured 25ml measure is often 32–35ml in a busy pub. You can’t see it on an inventory count because the bottle just empties faster than your till says it should. You catch it by weighing open bottles weekly and comparing bottle weight loss to the number of drinks sold. FreePour does this well. MarginEdge can do it, but you have to set it up correctly first.

On draught, losses hide in cellar temperature, line cleaning waste, and bad connection fittings. A cask at the wrong temperature will pour off 2–3% as foam before it’s saleable. Bad line cleaning waste another 1–2% every cycle. You catch this by dipping every cask every week and comparing dip variance against till sales. FreePour is built around this. MarginEdge treats it like any other inventory count.

On dry goods and food, losses are often waste, over-portioning, or spoilage. You catch this by recording plate waste and food waste actively, not just counting what’s left in the store. This is where MarginEdge excels—it has waste logging built in. FreePour doesn’t.

The practical point: if you run a wet-heavy pub (mostly draught and spirits, light food), FreePour is probably the better fit. If you run a food-forward pub or a managed house with a kitchen, MarginEdge is probably the better fit. If you run a balanced pub with both, you need both systems, or you need something that does both equally well.

Real Costs and Time Commitment

Most pub operators underestimate the time cost of stocktaking, and they underestimate the value of it too.

Let’s do the maths. A typical pub loses 1% of wet stock value through a combination of over-pouring, wastage, and measurement error. On a pub doing £5,000 a week in wet sales, that’s £250 a week in losses, or roughly £13,000 a year. Even if only 25–50% of that is recoverable through better stock discipline, you’re looking at £3,000–£5,000 a year. That’s your stocktaking budget right there.

A proper weekly count takes 45 minutes to an hour if you’re not used to it. After a month, you’ll do it in 30 minutes because you develop a routine. At the end of a month of proper counts, most pubs recover 1–2 gross profit points.

So the maths is simple: if a tool costs you £30 a month (£360 a year) and it saves you £3,000–£5,000 a year, it’s worth it, but only if you actually use it every week without fail. Both FreePour and MarginEdge are expensive if you only use them once a month. They’re cheap if you use them every week.

Here’s the honest truth: if you’re not prepared to count stock every single week, don’t buy either of them. Save your money and use a spreadsheet. A proper SmartPubTools approach with a simple weekly routine and a dipstick will catch 80% of the losses that these systems will catch, and it costs you nothing.

Which One Should You Actually Use?

Use FreePour If:

• You run a wet-heavy pub with mostly draught and spirits.
• You have multiple cask lines on rotation and need to track partial kegs accurately.
• You want the fastest, simplest weekly count routine that a bartender can do in 20 minutes.
• You’re not running a significant food operation.
• You’ve already got a separate system for labour or food costing.

Use MarginEdge If:

• You run a food-forward pub with a kitchen or significant food sales.
• You want to see actual food cost percentage and actual beverage cost percentage together.
• You want to track waste, recipe costs, and labour alongside stock.
• You’re serious about building a data-driven cost model for your business.
• You’ve got the discipline to record waste and recipe changes consistently.

Use Neither If:

• You’re not prepared to count stock every week without fail.
• You’ve got a very small pub where stock loss is under £2,000 a year.
• You don’t have reliable EPOS integration—manual data entry kills both systems.

My own experience: I ran FreePour for 18 months and marched through the weekly routine. It caught a serious over-pouring problem on one of my draught lines (a bartender was free-pouring at 35ml instead of 25ml), and it caught a systematic waste issue in my cellar (bad temperature control). Both of those findings saved me more than the annual cost of the system. But it required me to be consistent. In month four, I missed two weeks of counts, and by month six I’d stopped doing it properly. The tool was perfect; my discipline wasn’t.

The real question isn’t FreePour versus MarginEdge. The real question is whether you’re the kind of operator who will count stock every week, dip every cask, weigh every open bottle, and reconcile against the till the same day. If you are, either tool will pay for itself. If you’re not, neither will.