Brewery Management Software: Should You Build Custom or Stay on Ekos?
The trigger is not brewhouse size, it is how many people spend their week moving numbers between systems.
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The trigger is not brewhouse size, it is how many people spend their week moving numbers between systems. Under roughly 6,000 barrels from one site with most volume through your own taproom, buy Ekos or Beer30 and put the capital in stainless, which is where most readers of this page belong. Past about 10,000 barrels, two or more production sites, or more than half your volume through distribution, a focused first release runs $60,000 to $130,000 in 12 to 16 weeks and a full platform runs $150,000 to $400,000 across 6 to 12 months.
When is off the shelf genuinely the right call here?
Buy Ekos or Beer30 if you brew under about 6,000 barrels from one site, sell most of it through your own taproom and have fewer than twenty wholesale accounts. Both products have absorbed a decade of brewery specific edge cases you would otherwise pay to rediscover, and at that scale the subscription is not the problem in your profit and loss. Put the capital in tanks.
Buy if your issue is that people do not update the system. A custom cellar interface that nobody taps is exactly as stale as the whiteboard, and no amount of engineering fixes a process decision. If the cellar crew works off the board because it is right there and always current, the fix is to make the system that current, which usually means a scanner at the point of work rather than a new platform.
Keep the taproom point of sale (POS) you already have. Arryved and Toast both expose workable interfaces, so pulling taproom depletion into a wider ledger later is a small piece of work rather than a reason to replace anything. The same goes for your accounting system: nobody should be writing a general ledger.
The clean test is whether your numbers disagree with each other. If production, finance and sales all read the same figures and your monthly filing comes straight out of the system without a workbook in the middle, you do not have the problem this page is about. Configuration and discipline will serve you better than a build, and a partner worth hiring will tell you so before quoting.
When does a custom build actually pay off?
Two or more of these together, and the arithmetic has usually already turned.
The first is a person whose actual job is moving data between systems, full time or half time. That role is invisible on an organisation chart and expensive on a payroll, and it exists because seven tools do not know what the other six saw.
The second is that your Brewer's Report of Operations is assembled in Excel and one person understands the workbook. That is a compliance exposure rather than an inconvenience, because a signed federal filing derived from a spreadsheet is only as reliable as one person's memory and availability.
The third is keg float you argue about rather than report. A fleet in the thousands is a seven figure asset living on a spreadsheet, and quarterly deposit reconciliation with a distributor becomes a negotiation instead of an audit because neither side has clean data.
The fourth is two or more production sites, where inventory is per site in the packaged tools, transfers between your own facilities are manual, and cost of goods sold by product becomes a question your controller answers in Excel once a quarter.
The fifth is a barrel or blending programme your current system cannot represent, so it lives in a parallel spreadsheet. A blend pulled from three foeders and two stainless tanks does not survive a model that treats a batch as a linear parent and child tree, and that is genuine engineering rather than a report change.
The sixth is a distributor requiring electronic data interchange when your stack has no answer.
How do they compare on the things that matter in this industry?
Five dimensions decide this, and none of them is the subscription.
- Keg as an entity versus keg as a count. Both packaged systems track counts and scan barcodes. What they do not model is your keg economics: aged float per distributor against a specific contract, dwell time per account, and a deposit ledger you can send as a defensible document rather than a request. A build makes each keg carry a lifetime event record, which is what turns a quarterly negotiation into an audit.
- Offline behaviour. This is the clearest ceiling in the category. Coolers and dock areas have no signal, and scanner applications that assume connectivity get abandoned in month three. Offline first with a local queue and a defined rule for what happens when two devices scan the same keg is the only design that survives a cellar.
- Lineage for blends. A packaged model that expresses a batch as one parent and its children cannot attribute a single package run back to five source vessels with correct volumes and correct reporting lines. Ask any developer to draw this on a whiteboard before you sign, because anyone who draws a parent and child tree will be wrong within about ninety seconds.
- Multi site as a dimension. Packaged tools treat a second site as a separate account you switch between, so consolidated reporting means exporting from both and merging. A build can treat site as a dimension, which makes a transfer in bond one atomic event with matched records on both ends rather than two independent adjustments.
- Reporting rigidity. The report that changes behaviour is unexplained loss by vessel, by brewer and by recipe. Packaged yield fields ask for a number and let the variance disappear into a field nobody reports on.
Where the packaged tools win outright is breadth. They do purchasing, recipes, inventory, packaging and basic reporting on day one, and rebuilding all of that to reach parity is the most expensive mistake available here.
What does total cost of ownership look like at your scale?
Neither Ekos nor Beer30 publishes a rate card, so do this with your own renewal quote rather than a headline figure. Multiply it across five years with the contracted uplift, then add the seats you would need if the cellar crew, the packaging lead and the delivery drivers were all in the system rather than working from paper.
Then add the part that actually hurts, which is not the subscription. At the 25,000 barrel breweries we have scoped, reconciliation across production, finance and sales runs 25 to 40 hours a month. That is a full week of somebody's salary spent making numbers agree that should never have disagreed.
Then price the shrink and the float at your own wholesale rate. A brewery losing volume to trub and transfer across a couple of hundred batches a year, with no data trail telling you whether the cause is a hose connection, a transfer technique or a recipe that is thirstier than the card claims, is carrying a number it would investigate immediately if it arrived on one invoice.
On the build side, add the running costs to the band. Hosting is small at $150 to $500 a month because brewery data volumes are modest. Support and enhancement runs 15 to 20 percent of build cost a year, and an unusual share of it goes on change rather than defects: new package formats, a new distributor, a state you just registered in. Hardware is the line most often forgotten, since rugged handhelds run $400 to $900 each and get dropped, wet and cold, so budget partial fleet replacement every year and buy one more than you think you need. If you build electronic data interchange, add trading partner maintenance as a standing cost, because formats drift when distributors upgrade and a connection that broke quietly is worse than none.
What does the hybrid look like, and when is it the honest answer?
For most breweries in the middle of this decision, the hybrid is the answer, and it is the version we recommend most often.
Keep Ekos or Beer30 for purchasing, recipes, inventory and packaging. Keep your accounting system. Keep the taproom point of sale. Then build one thing properly, standalone, reading from your existing system by export or interface: either the keg ledger with offline scanning and distributor deposit reconciliation, or the transfer ledger with a compliant Brewer's Report of Operations. Pick whichever is bleeding most.
The reason to define the first release as one thing rather than a thin version of everything is specific to breweries. Cellar crews adopt systems that solve a problem they feel on the floor. A partial system that touches five workflows badly gets abandoned for the whiteboard inside a month, and then you have paid for software and still have a whiteboard.
Two more hybrid moves save real money. Use document extraction on the distributor reports you already receive as spreadsheets and portable document files before you build electronic data interchange, because it costs a fraction of a set of trading partner connections and in our experience gives back 12 to 20 hours a month at breweries covering six or seven states. And leave the tank scheduler until the transfer ledger exists, since a constraint model is only as good as the movement data underneath it and building it first produces a chart nobody trusts.
Which should you choose, by operator size and stage?
Under 6,000 barrels, one site, taproom led. Buy. Use Ekos or Beer30 properly, connect the taproom point of sale, and spend the difference on stainless.
6,000 to 10,000 barrels with growing wholesale. Stay bought, and start measuring. Count the reconciliation hours for one quarter and total your keg float. Those two numbers decide the next step and they cost nothing to produce.
Around 10,000 to 25,000 barrels, one site, distribution led. Build one thing. The keg ledger with offline scanning, batch linkage and a quarterly deposit reconciliation packet lands near $100,000 and about 15 weeks of effort in our worked example, and breweries running multi thousand keg fleets typically recover that from float recovery and loss reduction within 18 months.
Two or more production sites, or a barrel and blending programme. Build the transfer ledger first, because site as a dimension and proportional lineage both live there. A barrel ageing and blending programme adds roughly $20,000 to $45,000 and it is the best test of a developer you will get.
Multi state, multi distributor groups. The full platform at $150,000 to $400,000 phased over 6 to 12 months, with electronic data interchange budgeted at $12,000 to $30,000 per trading partner and sequenced last. A number of breweries stop after two phases and put the remaining budget into tanks, which is frequently the better commercial decision.
If you want that decision made properly rather than quickly, Digital Heroes contracts through India LLP, US LLC and UK LTD entities, so the agreement and the intellectual property assignment sit under law your own advisers already read. The document is yours whichever way you go.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- In the Flexera 2025 State of ITAM report, respondents reported roughly 33% of SaaS spend is wasted, underscoring how paying for off-the-shelf seats and tiers that go unused erodes the supposed cost advantage of generic SaaS. Source: Flexera (2025) →
- McKinsey found that tech debt can amount to 20-40% of the value of a company's entire technology estate before depreciation, and CIOs report that 10-20% of the budget for new products is diverted to resolving tech-debt issues. Source: McKinsey & Company (2020) →
- The performance gap between digital and AI leaders and laggards is widening: McKinsey reports leaders pull ahead on shareholder returns, and the average maturity spread between top and bottom performers jumped ~60% (from 10 points in 2016-19 to 16 points in 2020-22), reinforcing that the returns to transformation concentrate among top performers. Source: McKinsey & Company (2023) →
- Workers can expect 39% of their existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated over 2025-2030; 77% of employers plan to upskill their workforce, and 63% identify skill gaps as the biggest barrier to business transformation. Source: World Economic Forum (2025) →
Frequently asked questions
Can we migrate off Ekos without losing our history?
Yes. Batch records, recipes, the product catalogue and the vessel list come out through export and application interfaces, and the pattern that works is importing historical batches as read only records so your yield trends survive without dragging years of inconsistent data into the new model.
Budget four to six weeks of the project for migration and reconciliation, and expect to find data quality problems in the old system. Deciding how to handle those is a business conversation rather than a technical one, and it is better had before go live than after.
What if our current vendor raises the subscription at renewal?
Neither Ekos nor Beer30 publishes a rate card, so the only honest input is your own renewal quote and whatever uplift your contract allows. Model it across five years and add the seats you would need if cellar crew, packaging leads and drivers were in the system rather than on paper, because that is the version of the licence that matches what a build would replace.
The subscription is rarely what decides this. Reconciliation hours, keg float and unexplained shrink are larger numbers and they are all yours to measure.
How long before the cellar is actually using it?
Twelve to 16 weeks for a focused first release, and calendar time is often shorter than the effort estimate because scanning, reporting and integration can run in parallel with two developers.
What determines success is not the schedule, it is who is in the room during design. If the cellar crew are not involved they will keep using the whiteboard, and the system becomes a reconstruction exercise for whoever loses that argument. Ship outside your peak brewing season, give it to one crew, let them break it for two weeks, then roll it out.
Is Ekos enough instead of building?
Under about 6,000 barrels from one site with most volume through your taproom, comfortably, and we would tell you to stay. Both it and Beer30 have absorbed years of brewery specific edge cases you would pay to rediscover.
Where they strain is keg economics beyond counts, blends pulled from multiple foeders and stainless tanks, site as a dimension rather than a separate account, and scanning that has to work in a cooler with no signal. If two or more of those describe you, build a layer around them rather than a replacement for them.
How much does distributor EDI add to a build?
Budget $12,000 to $30,000 per trading partner for a first connection, plus ongoing maintenance because formats drift when distributors upgrade their systems. Every partner implements the transaction sets in its own dialect, so three or more pushes you toward the upper half of the full platform band on its own.
The cheaper interim step is document extraction from the spreadsheets and portable document files distributors already send, mapped to your product and account model with ambiguous rows flagged for a person. In our experience that alone gives back 12 to 20 hours a month at multi state breweries.
Will building actually fix our keg loss problem?
It will cut it if kegs are tracked as entities with a lifetime event ledger rather than as counts. That gives you aged float by distributor, dwell time per account and a quarterly deposit reconciliation packet you can send as a defensible document instead of opening a negotiation.
Scanning has to work offline, because coolers and dock areas have no signal and that is precisely why most packaged scanner applications get abandoned. In our experience breweries running multi thousand keg fleets recover the keg module build cost from float recovery and loss reduction within 18 months.
Can custom software produce a compliant federal report?
Yes, and it is more defensible than exporting to a spreadsheet, because the report becomes a query over an immutable transfer ledger rather than something a person assembles. Every liquid movement carries volume, source and destination vessel, timestamp, operator and a tax determination flag, and transfers in bond between your own facilities generate matched records on both sides.
Budget two full filing periods of parallel running and have your controller validate the report logic against real historical filings before anyone signs a return generated by new software.
What does a barrel ageing and blending programme add?
Typically $20,000 to $45,000, because proportional lineage across foeders and stainless is genuinely harder than a linear batch tree and the output has to survive an audit. One package run needs to attribute back to five source vessels with correct volumes and correct reporting lines.
It is also the best test of a developer available to you. Ask them to model a blend on a whiteboard before you sign. Anyone who draws a parent and child tree will be wrong within about ninety seconds, and you will have found that out for free.
What does it cost to maintain a custom ERP each year?
Budget 15 to 20 percent of the original build cost per year, so a $150,000 ERP needs roughly $22,000 to $30,000 annually for hosting, security patches, integration upkeep, and small improvements. Across Digital Heroes maintenance contracts, third-party APIs changing is the biggest recurring work item. That total still usually sits well under the license bill for a comparable NetSuite or Dynamics seat count.
How do I vet a software development agency before signing a contract?
Ask to speak with two past clients whose projects resemble yours in size and industry, and ask exactly who will write your code, since some agencies sell senior faces and deliver junior or subcontracted hands. Demand a written specification with acceptance criteria before any fixed price, and check that their portfolio links to products that are actually live. An instant quote given without questions about your workflows is the clearest warning sign there is.
What should I prepare before contacting a software development agency?
A one-page brief beats a 40-page requirements document: the business problem in plain words, who will use the system, the 5 to 10 workflows it must handle, the tools it must connect to, and your budget range and deadline driver. You do not need wireframes, a specification, or technical vocabulary; producing those is the agency's job during discovery. Stating a budget range up front is the single best move, because it gets you honest scoping instead of a quote engineered to win the meeting.
Can custom software connect to the tools we already use, like QuickBooks, Stripe, and Google Workspace?
Yes, and connecting your existing tools is one of the main reasons to build custom: mainstream platforms like QuickBooks, Stripe, Shopify, and Google Workspace all publish documented APIs. Budget 1 to 3 weeks of work per integration depending on API quality and how much data flows in both directions. Ask any vendor whether they have integrated with your specific tools before, because quirks like QuickBooks' OAuth token handling and API rate limits get learned on someone's project, and it should not be yours.
Is SAP overkill for a mid-sized company?
For most companies under about 500 employees, yes. SAP S/4HANA is built for multi-entity, multi-country enterprises with implementations measured in years and seven figures, while SAP Business One, the mid-market product, still forces your processes into its mold. If your competitive edge lives in how you operate, a custom ERP scoped to your actual workflows ships faster and costs a fraction of an SAP program.
Who owns the source code if an agency builds my ERP?
You should, in full, and it must be written into the contract as work for hire with IP assignment on payment. At Digital Heroes every client receives the complete repository, database schemas, and deployment documentation, so they could hand the system to another team tomorrow. Walk away from any ERP proposal built on the agency's proprietary platform with ongoing license fees, because that recreates the vendor lock-in you were escaping.
Will an app built for 10 users survive growing to 500?
Yes, if it is built on standard cloud infrastructure with a sound data model, because moving from 10 to 500 users is a hosting configuration change, not a rebuild. The scaling decisions that actually hurt are made early and invisibly: how the database is structured, how accounts and permissions are modeled, and whether background work is queued properly. Ask your agency how the system would handle ten times the load; the right answer is boring and specific, and a promise to cross that bridge later means you will pay for the bridge twice.
Can we migrate years of data out of our current system into new custom software?
Almost always yes, through CSV exports or the vendor's API, and migration should be scoped as its own workstream with field mapping, a dry run, and a planned cutover window rather than an afterthought. The real time sink is rarely moving the data; it is cleaning it, since years of duplicates, free-text fields, and inconsistent formats surface all at once. Pull a full export from your current vendor before committing to anything new, because some SaaS plans restrict exports on lower tiers.
What tech stack should a custom ERP be built on?
A boring, hireable one: Digital Heroes most often ships ERPs on PostgreSQL with a Node.js or Python backend and a React frontend, hosted on AWS or Azure. The stack matters far less than the database design, because your ERP schema will outlive every framework choice. Be skeptical of any agency proposing a niche or proprietary framework, since your ability to hire maintainers later is part of the total cost.
How small can the first version of my software be and still be worth building?
One workflow, end to end, for one type of user: the single process that currently burns the most hours or loses the most money. In Digital Heroes delivery experience, first versions scoped to 6 to 10 weeks of build time ship, get used, and generate the feedback that makes version two obviously right, while 9-month first versions routinely launch with features nobody touches. Everything you cut from v1 gets cheaper to build later, because real usage reorders the roadmap for you.
Who can build a custom ERP software system?
Digital Heroes builds custom ERP software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, with an assigned senior team rather than an account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other ERP software companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
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