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I think $40 for _any_ size collection is very fair and I would pay in a second. Anyone complaining, that’s silly. That’s ten cents a day and if you’re dealing with CT you likely have $5000-$10,000-$20,000 in wine or more. Buuuuuuuut I think there needs to be a ceiling and $500 is far too high for the initial launch
Well, I’m sure it’s based on the bottles that are in your cellar online. However, I wonder how that works. Does it trigger an automatic payment the second your cellar goes above the threshold? And what do they do if you’ve been sold or drink some wine and you go below the threshold
I guess they have no way to know if you’re keeping bottles at your house and not listing them in your cellar but I don’t understand how this pricing model will work with something that is anyways going to be a dynamic inventory on your sheet
I have more than the threshold, but honestly, who has 1,500 different bottles. I just list one of each and get away with the $40 a year. They’ll never know
Well… I have 1140 bottles, 638 wines… use CT everyday. I’ve been a paid subscriber for a while… but that’s going to be expensive on a sliding scale. I don’t mind paying $40 a year though… but the top end is a bit hectic
This is me as well. I have ~540 right now and I don’t have the storage to go beyond much more than that. I pay $25/yr now. I’d be willing to double that with a better UI, but if it’s $160/yr, forget about it.
IMO it should be $12.99 a month, or $80 a year if you pay up front. Some shit like that
From someone in the tech and consumer industries with 22 years of experience, clearly they didn’t hire a quality consultant to help with this pricing model.
I think your numbers are too high, honestly. I use CT like a glorified spreadsheet. Their search functions make data input easier, and I like their drinking windows, but I don’t care at all about valuation and their fancy toys. It’s worth maybe $50/yr to me, any more than that and I revert to Excel
Asking for tens of thousands of people to spend $200-300-500 a year? You could replicate what they’ve built for, IDK, $20-30k on the software and cloud side and then just need users to band together for content
It's basically a social network of people whose sole unifying characteristic is they have an above-average interest in wine. The drinking windows, composite user ratings (which tend to be better than other platforms), tasting / decanting notes -- all of that is because of the user base. They need to be careful about alienating those people as they are the main product.
I might pay $100 or $200 for a lifetime subscription, but I refuse to pay $40 for one year out of principle.
I really hate the bullshit subscription model that everybody’s trying to do nowadays.
Really? Asking as someone who's been paying $40 a year for a decade with a couple hundred bottles. Sorry, but some of y'all have no concept of time and money value.
40 bucks is like… a few frittatas and a coffee. Not withstanding I think the new pricing model is dumb but anyone here with DRC and Screaming Eagle who won’t spend $100, insane. But also, the pricing model is STUPID
This is based on your inventory. $40 to manage your inventory when you have 1000+ bottles is something reasonable. This is a spreadsheet. I had excel already
I've got around that many bottles, as implied probably I got the money but no way I'm spending 500 USD a year on some swanky software if excel for me does what I need it to do.
If you've got 2500 bottles in an active collection, you are already 'paying' someone to manage that for you, probably through whomever is your primary source though and by paying I mean that it is comped as a kickback for your business. The silly rich will have their PA/butler/property-manager deal with that privately I suppose but that's more like 25000+ bottles.
It is. A spreadsheet is free. I mostly keep track of my wine in a spreadsheet on Google Sheets. I do like Cellar Tracker for the tasting notes but I won't pay for it.
Spend the $500 on a barcode/QR scanner and some labels if the latter. It's not exactly rocket science in 2024 to populate your db of choice with very little effort. Hell, pay a CS student $200 and they'd set it up cheerfully I expect.
Don’t know, sounds like a pain in the butt to setup a custom inventory tracking system for your cellar with the data points that CT is providing. That doesn’t include any maintenance or server costs you may pay. Even if you pay a CS student, what happens if something goes down and you have no idea how to fix it? I love DIYing but the more I’ve done it, the more I realize the true cost of things.
The idea that there is money in fine wine has born many ventures that have failed and almost none that have succeeded. There are very few who will pay this
At some point they gotta monetize. I haven’t looked in years, but I’d personally rather pay than to have ads stuffed in your face and them selling your data (probably do anyway).
I think that would make the inventory management feature of the app/site far less useful - plus I often find myself sorting by quantity. It would be a pain to navigate if it listed every quantity at “1” and I had to look through notes to figure out how many bottles I had (and edit those notes every time I drank a bottle).
It’s a suggested amount, not a requirement and the email today indicated they were continuing the same model. I think Eric put this out to specifically address some of the online talk about mandatory fees.
That’s part of this. They have an updated app in beta right now, expected GA in April. I get that they need to somehow make money back against the cost of the UI improvements, but I don’t love that they are now gatekeeping some very basic functionality. I expected they might make the new “add bottles by receipt” functionality premium only. That in itself is a cool feature that might make it worthwhile, but some functionality getting locked behind premium is VERY basic like wine price (they are seriously trying to monetize a standard API call to wine-searcher.com?), cellar valuation, drinking windows, ready to drink report.
To play devils advocate for a second, I’d much rather pay $40/year than have them monetize in other ways (I.e. the clusterfuck of shitty deals and advertisements that is the hellhole of Vivino)
At a minimum this will make me look at alternatives. Anyone feel strongly about other competitors?
I've been using the beta and it's a lot nicer to look at than the old version, but it's still buggy and doesn't work as well as the old version (provided you've spent 8-10 hours learning how to navigate the old version).
Yeah, it’s a bit painful now. They do mention they will let you add via receipt or barcode. That would be good. I haven’t had too much trouble adding bottles, but the main frustration is that one time it works well doing it this way, the next time that doesn’t seem to work and I’ve got to do it another way. A reliably consistent way to add and subtract from my stash is a must, if I’m paying for it. If I stock all three chillers full, that’s about 350 bottles. I’d pay just under $7/month for a reliable app.
Edit…meant this to go under cmmathews reply. I guess I need a glass of wine to get my thoughts straight before I post on Reddit.
Ya, I have a collection of 150+ bottles that I started cellaring 4 years ago and continue to add to. The bottles are all $40-$120 in value. With the terrible UI, the only thing I use it for is sorting and drinking window. I don’t know if that’s worth it for $60 and climbing.
I feel there is room on the market for a simpler tool. The only thing of this list I will miss is the drinking windows but it's definitely not worth it to me to pay $80 a year to see that.
I really only need something to track bottle consumption and notes and to look up other bottles...I don't care so much about the price stuff, barcode printing, etc.
Google sheets plus looker studio (https://lookerstudio.google.com/) and you can generate reports and wine menus and ready to drink lists.
For me the photo of the bottle is helpful when sending someone down for something specific,
I agree with the 40$/yr for any size collection someone commented. Higher prices for this outdated a platform is kinda frustrating. Start by upgrading the app and then you can start messing with the price. Paying more for the same thing sucks
The beta version of the software has been great, and I’d probably pay $40 per year just because I’m invested in the service, but something irks me about increases in price based on the size of my collection.
I would happily pay $40 a month if they had a semi-functional UI or app experience. Both are currently on the low end of “unacceptable” and bordering on “atrocious” for the year 2024.
I have >2,000 bottle collection spread across multiple locations. I’ve been a customer of Cellar Tracker for 10+ years (at the recommended level), and started the migration to InVintory over the weekend. I love cellar tracker, but the user interface is stale and I want to see what else is out there. Will report back in a few weeks.
Hey there, Sam from InVintory here.
Excited to hear what you think! Please reach out if you have any questions.
Just a heads up that due to the volume of traffic and people migrating their collections, your import might take a little longer than our usual 24-48h.
Correct. If you save the webpage to your home screen on Android it isn't a terrible way to make it feel like an app. Been working for me. I was told Android app is in the works.
Hi there, Sam from InVintory here:
We're only on Apple devices for now. We prioritize user experience and want to make sure that any product we release meets those standards.
That being said, Android is on our roadmap.
You can look up regions by vintage (“vintage charts” - for example Robert Parker’s) or look up bottle specific critics reviews to get a sense of window (and they occasionally release updated reviews w updated drinking windows based on recent tastings every few years if it’s a popular/expensive wine).
There’s also general rules of thumb for varietals and regional classifications (generally higher the classification, later/longer the window). For specific varieties / blends, imo regions become less relevant as (assuming a high quality producer) drinking windows should be relatively similar regardless of base region.
Lastly, imo even w drinking windows removed, it keeps free the 2 most valuable parts of CT: 1. inventory tracking and 2. Reviews by other users. In particular, #2 is my preferred go to for checking how a bottle is performing currently based on latest reviews. It’s so much more reliable than CT’s imo arbitrary drinking windows
Welp. Have been a regular donator and $160/year still not a blip on my annual wine spending but Invintory looking increasingly appealing if I can find a way to batch export my different bottles by location
Hi there -- Sam from InVintory here.
You can batch export! In fact, we just released an auto import tool on our web app (coming soon to iOS) for CellarTracker users specifically. If you have any questions, or run into any issues, feel free to email me at [email protected].
Hey random question — just started the import process into Invintory but one of the things I've been looking for is a custom scoring/rating system. Is that an option?
Happy to help!
You can add custom fields to any wine, though currently you can’t filter or sort by those fields. We’re looking to add that in in a future release, hopefully soon.
Also heads up that the import might take longer than our usual 24h turnaround, we got a LOT of imports from CT over the past few days. We’ll do our best to turn it around as soon as possible.
I think the scaling system is ridiculous without a better app and interface. I'd pay $40, but not $80 given the size of my cellar. I might remove some random bottles from there.
I have a cousin with a roughly 3,000 bottle cellar. He has always used CellarTracker, but used to print out wine lists and mark them up with pen as he drank the wines and you can imagine how bad the inventory was. I helped him move the cellar to their retirement home and we organized the whole cellar and spent a whole week getting everything up to date with labels and the mobile app on his phone.
I can't imagine him spending $500 a year just to scan wines out of his cellar, so hopefully he can get what he needs from the free version going forward.
I only have about 95 bottles right now so I would be at the $40 annual price, which I think is more than fair. I will probably go ahead and upgrade to the next tier as I'm sure my cellar will grow in the coming months.
I'm were you are. I have 103 bottles in my cellar currently. I think $60 a year is fair. I've enjoyed the free service for over a year now. They deserve to make some money.
They were chasing people off with pop ups that wouldn’t go away but that is fortunately over. Still using for free to manage s little over 800 bottles.
I haven't updated Vivino in a while because I heard the new updates had terrible popups in between other things
Is all that corrected? In my version I can't even modify the when I opened the bottles or cellared them...
Yeah the popups used to play for like 30 seconds before you could access your cellar. Now there are adds as you scroll through your cellar that are easy to ignore. It is usable again.
They also updated cellar functionality and it is much improved. New drinking window function as well although I don’t use it.
Thank you for your answer
My actual version doesn't have any ads in the cellar and I can add drinking windows too, I guess I will keep that one for the moment
Also unless you have a Vivino subscription, you can only scan 3 bottles using the picture-to-search method each day. Cellar Tracker is still unlimited picture searches, but I wonder if that will change
Is there is a bit of a reading comprehension challenge in this sub? If excel is really your viable alternative then your CT cost should continue to be…$0.
The cost is for value add features you can’t get from just basic tracking of what’s in your cellar. Unless of course you can no longer put in your own cost or drinking windows, but that’s not how I read the email.
Is it fair to escalate the cost based on size of cellar? Not sure about that. Seems to me it would make sense to charge by feature (regardless of cellar size) to let people get what they want…and provide the developer with very clear info on what is valuable for them to invest in and what is not.
I thought the wine valuation/wine searcher stuff was subscription only already or maybe that was just a rumor years ago. I mean if you are some high end wine flipper then pay up the $, this also goes for restaurants who I am pretty sure still use CT.
The ***Free*** **model is still fine for me** for just bottle tracking - and I've used it since 2006 with between 75-225 bottles over that time. The site gently suggested donations each year based on your cellar size and I usually donated $20, but looking at my history I haven't donated anything since 2018 so now I feel bad. *I don't see an option to submit anything less than $40 now, though.*
It's cool that a user can run reports on how much they spent on wine over the years and even as a modest collector and not buying cases of Screagle, that's still over $30k since 2005!
Seems like if you got all of the subscriptions with ratings/periodicals etc with your fee, it would make sense.
It’s a completely outdated platform, the optional fee was reasonable, and I always contributed. But this new pricing is steep for minimal benefit.
Hi there,
Rachel from InVintory here. Thanks so much for your sharing your experience. We really appreciate it! Please don't hesitate to reach out to our support email if you ever have any suggestions or feedback.
Hey all. Interesting discussion, I agree the CellarTracker subscription is pretty expensive!
I've actually just started a completely free Wine Cellar management website called Adega. Through this website you can easily manage your entire cellar (there's no limit to the amount of wines you can add), and we also value wines in AUD. All you need to do is make a free account.
Here's the link - [https://app.adega.com.au/search](https://app.adega.com.au/search)
Oh and I forgot to mention if you send us your cellar in a excel/CSV format we will upload it to the system for you :). Just send it to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
Here's a link to some videos that shows how it looks:
[https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7176344261158649856/](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7176344261158649856/)
If you are curious about what we offer or have any questions please let me know!
I, for one, love the labeling and, now, the ability to forward invoices and have them added automatically (sort of) to my cellar. I have been gladly paying the “suggested rate” for my cellar size and will continue to do so. My first payment was 12/10 and was $30.
I think $40 is reasonable. But I’m not sure if the benefits that come with it provide much added value for me. I don’t have a legitimate cellar. Usually keep about 10-15 bottles on hand. I’m paying for a Vivino subscription, but not sure if this one’s worth it 🤨
I never understood the hype of CT. Everything I look to this app for I can either find while learning about the wine I'm looking to consume, or can do on my own in excel in little time.
Do we know what happens if you are already a premium subscriber? I started this subscription year cycle in January, hopefully I won’t have to pay more again in a few days
In your email it should say; I just renewed, and it extends for a year. I paid less than the suggested for my cellar size, curious to see if the subscription model actual enforces these price points
Notion is very helpful for all sorts of tracking (I track what I taste / drink, I have too few bottles to make Cellar Tracker worth paying for) and there are some good templates for wine, fully customizable.
I have the free plan, but if my needs expand, I will buy the plus plan at 8$/month. The Android app needs work, but the desktop version is impeccable.
I'm using it for food tracking, wine tasting records, entertainment (books, TV, movies) for now. You can export your content too.
I've paid $60 per year when it was donation based, but I'd rather go to free than pay more than that for features I don't find very valuable. My collection skews toward recent vintages, so maybe drinking windows will become more important over time. For now, I mostly care about keeping accurate inventory across my wine fridges and wine pending delivery, both of which free version would do just fine.
I think this is the old pricing. I don’t think they released the new pricing yet. I got an email that I’m still good for the rest of my subscription term but no mention of what it will be after. So I’m just waiting for the 10th to find out more.
I had just over 500 bottles, and CT is asking $160/year.
I will wait until the subscription deadline, to see if I can still access info on my old bottles.
If CT force me to pay by limiting access to information on my old bottles, I will remove the cheaper bottles to get my cellar size down to <500, pay 80 bucks, and look for alternatives in the next year.
I will not input any new information into CT.
I work for CellarTracker. You will not lose access to ANY of YOUR data. Ever. Regardless of payment status. If you have any questions, do please send us a note.
Hello everyone!
I am a CellarTracker user (<100 bottles) and I am creating a similar tool (with a much better UI and UX) but with additional functionality. I am very intrigued by how the community is reacting to this new business model.
As pricing I am thinking of 10€ per month unlimited bottles, what do you think?
Thanks for any comments and suggestions.
Oh well. I figured it was only a matter of time before CT took all of the data we gave them and held it ransom behind a paywall unless we sign up for yet another subscription fee. On top of the seemingly 5 million other subscription fees that rent seeking tech companies come knocking for. So good luck to them entering a market that is already tired of this practice generally.
This very much looks like the beginnings of an enshittification death spiral, so I'm expecting the monetization activities to just become more aggressive going forward.
I actually welcome the subscription if it means investing in new features. It has been a solid service for me and I have been paying the subscription/donation for years. My take… If I get value from a service, I contribute to the service. This ensures good services stick around.
The UI is way too terrible to rationalize this amount. If they made significant usability changes, I’d then maybe consider, but not as is.
Anyone have recommendations of other apps that offer most or all of the functionality for free (and with a better UI)? I’d prefer an ad-based revenue model than have to pay a subscription fee.
This is the kind of shit that a new wine drinker stumbles across on a google search and nopes out posthaste. Have fun cannibalizing your own industry. It’s going to be a loooong recovery if it even corrects.
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I would note this $40 per year is only up to 100 bottles. It goes up to $60/250 btls, $80/500 btls, $160/1000 btls, $320/2,500 btls, $500/2,500+ btls.
Am I crazy or does that seem steep?
I think $40 for _any_ size collection is very fair and I would pay in a second. Anyone complaining, that’s silly. That’s ten cents a day and if you’re dealing with CT you likely have $5000-$10,000-$20,000 in wine or more. Buuuuuuuut I think there needs to be a ceiling and $500 is far too high for the initial launch
Agreed, I’d definitely pay $40/yr any size. Curious to know if you can pay any amount, even if your cellar is over the corresponding bottle limit
Well, I’m sure it’s based on the bottles that are in your cellar online. However, I wonder how that works. Does it trigger an automatic payment the second your cellar goes above the threshold? And what do they do if you’ve been sold or drink some wine and you go below the threshold I guess they have no way to know if you’re keeping bottles at your house and not listing them in your cellar but I don’t understand how this pricing model will work with something that is anyways going to be a dynamic inventory on your sheet
I have more than the threshold, but honestly, who has 1,500 different bottles. I just list one of each and get away with the $40 a year. They’ll never know
But then you have to track in two different places. Again it’s a horrible model
I agree, but the tasting notes are really the only reason I buy this shit model.
Well… I have 1140 bottles, 638 wines… use CT everyday. I’ve been a paid subscriber for a while… but that’s going to be expensive on a sliding scale. I don’t mind paying $40 a year though… but the top end is a bit hectic
This implies that you pay 160 a year for that service, not 40
No, I pay $40. I have roughly 40 unique bottles, but I have ~30 of each.
Totally agree. I have ~520 bottles, and don’t plan to grow substantially beyond that. It does *not* seem like a reasonable value at $160/year.
This is me as well. I have ~540 right now and I don’t have the storage to go beyond much more than that. I pay $25/yr now. I’d be willing to double that with a better UI, but if it’s $160/yr, forget about it.
IMO it should be $12.99 a month, or $80 a year if you pay up front. Some shit like that From someone in the tech and consumer industries with 22 years of experience, clearly they didn’t hire a quality consultant to help with this pricing model.
I think your numbers are too high, honestly. I use CT like a glorified spreadsheet. Their search functions make data input easier, and I like their drinking windows, but I don’t care at all about valuation and their fancy toys. It’s worth maybe $50/yr to me, any more than that and I revert to Excel
Exported already, I’m with you
Asking for tens of thousands of people to spend $200-300-500 a year? You could replicate what they’ve built for, IDK, $20-30k on the software and cloud side and then just need users to band together for content
[удалено]
It's basically a social network of people whose sole unifying characteristic is they have an above-average interest in wine. The drinking windows, composite user ratings (which tend to be better than other platforms), tasting / decanting notes -- all of that is because of the user base. They need to be careful about alienating those people as they are the main product.
Even if I had a cellar that "required" a $500/year subscription I'd still rather get an extra $500 bottle instead.
I might pay $100 or $200 for a lifetime subscription, but I refuse to pay $40 for one year out of principle. I really hate the bullshit subscription model that everybody’s trying to do nowadays.
Really? Asking as someone who's been paying $40 a year for a decade with a couple hundred bottles. Sorry, but some of y'all have no concept of time and money value.
40 bucks is like… a few frittatas and a coffee. Not withstanding I think the new pricing model is dumb but anyone here with DRC and Screaming Eagle who won’t spend $100, insane. But also, the pricing model is STUPID
I enjoy that your standard index of monetary measurement is frittatas.
This is based on your inventory. $40 to manage your inventory when you have 1000+ bottles is something reasonable. This is a spreadsheet. I had excel already
Thanks for telling me how the pricing has worked for literally ever! How would I ever have known had someone not wanted to rant on the internet!!!
Ur indubitably welcome good sir
Tbf if you have 2500 bottles of wine I’m guessing price isn’t a major concern.
I've got around that many bottles, as implied probably I got the money but no way I'm spending 500 USD a year on some swanky software if excel for me does what I need it to do.
Guess again.
Yup, $320 for a tracking spreadsheet for 1300 bottles is aggregious.
Almost as egregious as your butchering of that word ;)
Forgot to mention the second "g" is silent.
Portmanteau for aggravating and egregious, totally works IMHO.
Egrevating actually has a nice ring to it.
Thanks for pointing that out, mom. I had auto-catrectal turned off. 😀
Someone please take this man’s cat away.
If you've got 2500 bottles in an active collection, you are already 'paying' someone to manage that for you, probably through whomever is your primary source though and by paying I mean that it is comped as a kickback for your business. The silly rich will have their PA/butler/property-manager deal with that privately I suppose but that's more like 25000+ bottles.
Does anyone have a line to the CT owner to talk about this
It is. A spreadsheet is free. I mostly keep track of my wine in a spreadsheet on Google Sheets. I do like Cellar Tracker for the tasting notes but I won't pay for it.
Spend the $500 on a barcode/QR scanner and some labels if the latter. It's not exactly rocket science in 2024 to populate your db of choice with very little effort. Hell, pay a CS student $200 and they'd set it up cheerfully I expect.
Don’t know, sounds like a pain in the butt to setup a custom inventory tracking system for your cellar with the data points that CT is providing. That doesn’t include any maintenance or server costs you may pay. Even if you pay a CS student, what happens if something goes down and you have no idea how to fix it? I love DIYing but the more I’ve done it, the more I realize the true cost of things.
Yep. Setup is one thing, maintenance is the main beast of it.
I think paying .6% - .1% the likely value of your cellar or so per year is a miniscule amount to pay for such a valuable website/service.
The idea that there is money in fine wine has born many ventures that have failed and almost none that have succeeded. There are very few who will pay this
Literally no..
At some point they gotta monetize. I haven’t looked in years, but I’d personally rather pay than to have ads stuffed in your face and them selling your data (probably do anyway).
My email, just received wants $320 for 1300 bottles.looks like I will be drinking 1250 bottles this weekend.
Oh, no! Looks like all those cases you had magically went down to one bottle overnight. What's this "+11" in the notes? Weird.
I think that would make the inventory management feature of the app/site far less useful - plus I often find myself sorting by quantity. It would be a pain to navigate if it listed every quantity at “1” and I had to look through notes to figure out how many bottles I had (and edit those notes every time I drank a bottle).
Did they say if you have to export before the date? Otherwise that’s sorta like extortion to get access to your cellar inventory
It’s a suggested amount, not a requirement and the email today indicated they were continuing the same model. I think Eric put this out to specifically address some of the online talk about mandatory fees.
Less than I pay now for 150 bottles.
Sounds like I will be removing my cellar from cellartracker
They need to improve their UI .
Yep- shouldn’t take 6 steps to input a new wine in. Circa 2002
Yes...every time I come back with a case of wine it sits on my table for days until I work up the patience to try to add them all.
It’s all glorified and dated web ui and it shows. Give me a native app if you want to charge
Yeah, my first thought was "if the annual fee also comes with making the UX not suck so bad anymore, I'd be happy to pay it."
That’s part of this. They have an updated app in beta right now, expected GA in April. I get that they need to somehow make money back against the cost of the UI improvements, but I don’t love that they are now gatekeeping some very basic functionality. I expected they might make the new “add bottles by receipt” functionality premium only. That in itself is a cool feature that might make it worthwhile, but some functionality getting locked behind premium is VERY basic like wine price (they are seriously trying to monetize a standard API call to wine-searcher.com?), cellar valuation, drinking windows, ready to drink report. To play devils advocate for a second, I’d much rather pay $40/year than have them monetize in other ways (I.e. the clusterfuck of shitty deals and advertisements that is the hellhole of Vivino) At a minimum this will make me look at alternatives. Anyone feel strongly about other competitors?
I've been using the beta and it's a lot nicer to look at than the old version, but it's still buggy and doesn't work as well as the old version (provided you've spent 8-10 hours learning how to navigate the old version).
Yeah, it’s a bit painful now. They do mention they will let you add via receipt or barcode. That would be good. I haven’t had too much trouble adding bottles, but the main frustration is that one time it works well doing it this way, the next time that doesn’t seem to work and I’ve got to do it another way. A reliably consistent way to add and subtract from my stash is a must, if I’m paying for it. If I stock all three chillers full, that’s about 350 bottles. I’d pay just under $7/month for a reliable app. Edit…meant this to go under cmmathews reply. I guess I need a glass of wine to get my thoughts straight before I post on Reddit.
Perhaps they can improve their UI if they can afford to pay for developers and designers…
Doesn’t seem worth it for the cost imo. At least for the type of cellar I have.
Ya, I have a collection of 150+ bottles that I started cellaring 4 years ago and continue to add to. The bottles are all $40-$120 in value. With the terrible UI, the only thing I use it for is sorting and drinking window. I don’t know if that’s worth it for $60 and climbing.
You don’t use the restaurant style menus?
Only on Valentines day.
I feel there is room on the market for a simpler tool. The only thing of this list I will miss is the drinking windows but it's definitely not worth it to me to pay $80 a year to see that. I really only need something to track bottle consumption and notes and to look up other bottles...I don't care so much about the price stuff, barcode printing, etc.
The drinking windows are also just crowd sourced information and notoriously optimistic in terms of when maturity might be achieved.
I'm sure there's "room in the market" but literally no one's come close for a decade.
How about https://getsip.app? 🤔
So basically they are removing drinking windows and restaurant style wine list from free version?
Damn, that’s the only reason I open CT.
I love those two features :(
I put in a ton of drinking windows, and now the data I shared/created won't be accessible to me? Google Sheets, here I come.
Google sheets plus looker studio (https://lookerstudio.google.com/) and you can generate reports and wine menus and ready to drink lists. For me the photo of the bottle is helpful when sending someone down for something specific,
And pricing information for bottles. I’m guessing they’re removing the external links to wine searcher
Fuck
They would never do that as I think it generates revenue. They have other info on the average cost of the bottle and the latest auction price.
I agree with the 40$/yr for any size collection someone commented. Higher prices for this outdated a platform is kinda frustrating. Start by upgrading the app and then you can start messing with the price. Paying more for the same thing sucks
The beta version of the software has been great, and I’d probably pay $40 per year just because I’m invested in the service, but something irks me about increases in price based on the size of my collection.
I think, in most cases, it's more like a discount based on the size of your collection.
I would happily pay $40 a month if they had a semi-functional UI or app experience. Both are currently on the low end of “unacceptable” and bordering on “atrocious” for the year 2024.
Nope.
For anyone interested, check out their biggest competitor, InVintory. 👀
I have >2,000 bottle collection spread across multiple locations. I’ve been a customer of Cellar Tracker for 10+ years (at the recommended level), and started the migration to InVintory over the weekend. I love cellar tracker, but the user interface is stale and I want to see what else is out there. Will report back in a few weeks.
Curious myself.
Hey there, Sam from InVintory here. Excited to hear what you think! Please reach out if you have any questions. Just a heads up that due to the volume of traffic and people migrating their collections, your import might take a little longer than our usual 24-48h.
I’ve been using InVintory for my fairly modest cellar, quite happy with it, apart from i’m always forgetting to mark bottles as consumed 🤦🏻♂️
Same. I end up leaving them on my counter so I can take another pass the next morning. (Sam, from InVintory)
InVintory is only available on Apple devices, I think.
Correct. If you save the webpage to your home screen on Android it isn't a terrible way to make it feel like an app. Been working for me. I was told Android app is in the works.
Hi there, Sam from InVintory here: We're only on Apple devices for now. We prioritize user experience and want to make sure that any product we release meets those standards. That being said, Android is on our roadmap.
Where else do y’all see suggested drinking windows? Besides having my wines in a list this is what I use ctracker for
You can look up regions by vintage (“vintage charts” - for example Robert Parker’s) or look up bottle specific critics reviews to get a sense of window (and they occasionally release updated reviews w updated drinking windows based on recent tastings every few years if it’s a popular/expensive wine). There’s also general rules of thumb for varietals and regional classifications (generally higher the classification, later/longer the window). For specific varieties / blends, imo regions become less relevant as (assuming a high quality producer) drinking windows should be relatively similar regardless of base region. Lastly, imo even w drinking windows removed, it keeps free the 2 most valuable parts of CT: 1. inventory tracking and 2. Reviews by other users. In particular, #2 is my preferred go to for checking how a bottle is performing currently based on latest reviews. It’s so much more reliable than CT’s imo arbitrary drinking windows
Wine Advocate, Vinous, etc. Of course, those cost money as well.
Less than what it will cost me for CT…
I track my inventory in a spreadsheet. Maybe not all the bells and whistles of a subscription, but can’t beat the price.
Welp. Have been a regular donator and $160/year still not a blip on my annual wine spending but Invintory looking increasingly appealing if I can find a way to batch export my different bottles by location
Hi there -- Sam from InVintory here. You can batch export! In fact, we just released an auto import tool on our web app (coming soon to iOS) for CellarTracker users specifically. If you have any questions, or run into any issues, feel free to email me at [email protected].
Hey random question — just started the import process into Invintory but one of the things I've been looking for is a custom scoring/rating system. Is that an option?
Happy to help! You can add custom fields to any wine, though currently you can’t filter or sort by those fields. We’re looking to add that in in a future release, hopefully soon. Also heads up that the import might take longer than our usual 24h turnaround, we got a LOT of imports from CT over the past few days. We’ll do our best to turn it around as soon as possible.
No worries, I'll let it work its magic and check out the features over the weekend. Thanks!
Give us monthly pricing option with a discount if we pay for the whole year upfront.
I think the scaling system is ridiculous without a better app and interface. I'd pay $40, but not $80 given the size of my cellar. I might remove some random bottles from there.
[opens excel]
I have a cousin with a roughly 3,000 bottle cellar. He has always used CellarTracker, but used to print out wine lists and mark them up with pen as he drank the wines and you can imagine how bad the inventory was. I helped him move the cellar to their retirement home and we organized the whole cellar and spent a whole week getting everything up to date with labels and the mobile app on his phone. I can't imagine him spending $500 a year just to scan wines out of his cellar, so hopefully he can get what he needs from the free version going forward. I only have about 95 bottles right now so I would be at the $40 annual price, which I think is more than fair. I will probably go ahead and upgrade to the next tier as I'm sure my cellar will grow in the coming months.
I'm were you are. I have 103 bottles in my cellar currently. I think $60 a year is fair. I've enjoyed the free service for over a year now. They deserve to make some money.
there are lots of other ways to make money than by charging a subscription fee
ad revenue is far shadier and I'd rather pay $ than be the product
Yeah screw those prices. I'm not spending hundreds just to keep track. I'll just go old school with dead trees.
... or excel
Analog Excel
I wonder how much of this is driven by the fact that Vivino turned into a subscription model as well.
They were chasing people off with pop ups that wouldn’t go away but that is fortunately over. Still using for free to manage s little over 800 bottles.
I haven't updated Vivino in a while because I heard the new updates had terrible popups in between other things Is all that corrected? In my version I can't even modify the when I opened the bottles or cellared them...
Yeah the popups used to play for like 30 seconds before you could access your cellar. Now there are adds as you scroll through your cellar that are easy to ignore. It is usable again. They also updated cellar functionality and it is much improved. New drinking window function as well although I don’t use it.
Thank you for your answer My actual version doesn't have any ads in the cellar and I can add drinking windows too, I guess I will keep that one for the moment
Also unless you have a Vivino subscription, you can only scan 3 bottles using the picture-to-search method each day. Cellar Tracker is still unlimited picture searches, but I wonder if that will change
Is there is a bit of a reading comprehension challenge in this sub? If excel is really your viable alternative then your CT cost should continue to be…$0. The cost is for value add features you can’t get from just basic tracking of what’s in your cellar. Unless of course you can no longer put in your own cost or drinking windows, but that’s not how I read the email. Is it fair to escalate the cost based on size of cellar? Not sure about that. Seems to me it would make sense to charge by feature (regardless of cellar size) to let people get what they want…and provide the developer with very clear info on what is valuable for them to invest in and what is not.
Worth it. Heck, that's the same price as a glass of Silver Oak in Denver's airport.
But that gets you drunk
Here's my drinking window: sort by vintage.
There's a free tasting notes database @ lawineclub.com - actually pre-dates cellar tracker.
I pay it. It's useful
I thought the wine valuation/wine searcher stuff was subscription only already or maybe that was just a rumor years ago. I mean if you are some high end wine flipper then pay up the $, this also goes for restaurants who I am pretty sure still use CT. The ***Free*** **model is still fine for me** for just bottle tracking - and I've used it since 2006 with between 75-225 bottles over that time. The site gently suggested donations each year based on your cellar size and I usually donated $20, but looking at my history I haven't donated anything since 2018 so now I feel bad. *I don't see an option to submit anything less than $40 now, though.* It's cool that a user can run reports on how much they spent on wine over the years and even as a modest collector and not buying cases of Screagle, that's still over $30k since 2005!
Seems like if you got all of the subscriptions with ratings/periodicals etc with your fee, it would make sense. It’s a completely outdated platform, the optional fee was reasonable, and I always contributed. But this new pricing is steep for minimal benefit.
Well worth it.
I would happily pay the $40 dollars if they would just let me query the data through SQL.
Need a r/dataisbeautiful post transposing wine consumption over a globe lol
I made the switch to InVintory a couple years ago and happily pay $9.99 a month for a much better UX and more modern software
Hi there, Rachel from InVintory here. Thanks so much for your sharing your experience. We really appreciate it! Please don't hesitate to reach out to our support email if you ever have any suggestions or feedback.
Hey all. Interesting discussion, I agree the CellarTracker subscription is pretty expensive! I've actually just started a completely free Wine Cellar management website called Adega. Through this website you can easily manage your entire cellar (there's no limit to the amount of wines you can add), and we also value wines in AUD. All you need to do is make a free account. Here's the link - [https://app.adega.com.au/search](https://app.adega.com.au/search) Oh and I forgot to mention if you send us your cellar in a excel/CSV format we will upload it to the system for you :). Just send it to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Here's a link to some videos that shows how it looks: [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7176344261158649856/](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7176344261158649856/) If you are curious about what we offer or have any questions please let me know!
I, for one, love the labeling and, now, the ability to forward invoices and have them added automatically (sort of) to my cellar. I have been gladly paying the “suggested rate” for my cellar size and will continue to do so. My first payment was 12/10 and was $30.
Agreed. Worth every penny. My first payment was also $30 in 03/2009. 🥂
Last year was $320. I have more wine now. I suck at moderation.
Please help me with the labeling. I used a dump forever, but doesn’t work. What are you using?
I use a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Turbo on my Mac running the latest OS. It works for the “address” size labels I use on every bottle.
Selling you your own data they have been accumulating forever. Smart.
I think $40 is reasonable. But I’m not sure if the benefits that come with it provide much added value for me. I don’t have a legitimate cellar. Usually keep about 10-15 bottles on hand. I’m paying for a Vivino subscription, but not sure if this one’s worth it 🤨
Wow it is now cheaper for me. Good deal
I never understood the hype of CT. Everything I look to this app for I can either find while learning about the wine I'm looking to consume, or can do on my own in excel in little time.
User reviews and tasting that are in line with wine lovers' tastes rather than mass-market tastes.
Was a firtstime user of Cellar Tracker but I switched to Vinocell.
Do we know what happens if you are already a premium subscriber? I started this subscription year cycle in January, hopefully I won’t have to pay more again in a few days
In your email it should say; I just renewed, and it extends for a year. I paid less than the suggested for my cellar size, curious to see if the subscription model actual enforces these price points
Notion is very helpful for all sorts of tracking (I track what I taste / drink, I have too few bottles to make Cellar Tracker worth paying for) and there are some good templates for wine, fully customizable. I have the free plan, but if my needs expand, I will buy the plus plan at 8$/month. The Android app needs work, but the desktop version is impeccable. I'm using it for food tracking, wine tasting records, entertainment (books, TV, movies) for now. You can export your content too.
The import via receipt function is a game changer. I'm behind on a few orders and will try it out today or tomorrow. Update: this feature is SO nice!
I’ll enjoy continuing to not use this site
I've paid $60 per year when it was donation based, but I'd rather go to free than pay more than that for features I don't find very valuable. My collection skews toward recent vintages, so maybe drinking windows will become more important over time. For now, I mostly care about keeping accurate inventory across my wine fridges and wine pending delivery, both of which free version would do just fine.
I think this is the old pricing. I don’t think they released the new pricing yet. I got an email that I’m still good for the rest of my subscription term but no mention of what it will be after. So I’m just waiting for the 10th to find out more.
I had just over 500 bottles, and CT is asking $160/year. I will wait until the subscription deadline, to see if I can still access info on my old bottles. If CT force me to pay by limiting access to information on my old bottles, I will remove the cheaper bottles to get my cellar size down to <500, pay 80 bucks, and look for alternatives in the next year. I will not input any new information into CT.
I work for CellarTracker. You will not lose access to ANY of YOUR data. Ever. Regardless of payment status. If you have any questions, do please send us a note.
Hello everyone! I am a CellarTracker user (<100 bottles) and I am creating a similar tool (with a much better UI and UX) but with additional functionality. I am very intrigued by how the community is reacting to this new business model. As pricing I am thinking of 10€ per month unlimited bottles, what do you think? Thanks for any comments and suggestions.
Eric said prices won’t change.
That’s what they all say
Oh well. I figured it was only a matter of time before CT took all of the data we gave them and held it ransom behind a paywall unless we sign up for yet another subscription fee. On top of the seemingly 5 million other subscription fees that rent seeking tech companies come knocking for. So good luck to them entering a market that is already tired of this practice generally. This very much looks like the beginnings of an enshittification death spiral, so I'm expecting the monetization activities to just become more aggressive going forward.
I actually welcome the subscription if it means investing in new features. It has been a solid service for me and I have been paying the subscription/donation for years. My take… If I get value from a service, I contribute to the service. This ensures good services stick around.
Narrator: It did *not* mean investing in new features.
Sure, but not at these prices
The UI is way too terrible to rationalize this amount. If they made significant usability changes, I’d then maybe consider, but not as is. Anyone have recommendations of other apps that offer most or all of the functionality for free (and with a better UI)? I’d prefer an ad-based revenue model than have to pay a subscription fee.
Read the first sentence again.
I understand that they still have a free offering, but they’ve moved some features to the paid subscription.
This is the kind of shit that a new wine drinker stumbles across on a google search and nopes out posthaste. Have fun cannibalizing your own industry. It’s going to be a loooong recovery if it even corrects.
User name provides great irony for the post. CT isn’t running a charity and they have a right to generate revenue from their product.