--- title: Affordable software for wholesale coffee roasters Metadescription: What a small coffee roaster selling wholesale to cafes can afford, and why roasting software and an ordering portal are two separate purchases. author: Dan Edwards author_role: Founder author_url: https://danedwardsdeveloper.com author_linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-edwards-developer published: 2026-08-26 updated: 2026-09-27 --- Token estimate: ~3,200 # Affordable software for wholesale coffee roasters Two different products get sold to roasters as "roasting software", and only one of them takes an order. Roast platforms start at the green coffee and end at the bag, and they price on the weight you put through the machine. Order desks start at the cafe and end at the invoice, and they price on seats, tiers or a cut of the payment. A roaster with a dozen wholesale accounts is usually short of the second, not the first, and the affordable route is to buy them as two separate purchases rather than wait for one platform to cover both. [How to take wholesale coffee orders from cafes](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/how-to-take-wholesale-coffee-orders-from-cafes) covers the order itself. By **[Dan Edwards](https://wholesalehandler.com/about)**, Founder. ## Roast software and an order desk solve different problems The category reads as one market because the vendors share a trade show, but the two halves barely overlap. A roast platform is built around the machine: green stock, roast curves, batch records, cupping scores, traceability from lot to bag. An order desk is built around the account: a catalogue, a price per cafe, a deadline, a repeating weekly order, an invoice at the end of the month. | What you are buying | What it covers | What the bill scales on | | --- | --- | --- | | Roast platform | Green inventory, roast profiles, batch records, cupping, traceability | Pounds or kilos roasted, connected machines, seats | | Order desk | Catalogue, per-cafe pricing, cutoffs, repeat orders, invoices | Seats, orders, a cut of payments, or a flat fee | A roaster who buys only the first still collects the weekly order by email and DM. A roaster who buys only the second still keeps roast records in a spreadsheet, which is where most small roasters already keep them. ## The cheapest roasting software does nothing with an order The free option in this field is real. Artisan is open source, free for commercial use, runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and a Raspberry Pi, and supports a few hundred machines. It logs curves, rate-of-rise and development time. It holds no customers, no price lists and no orders, so it changes nothing about how Tuesday's delivery gets booked. The paid companion to Artisan adds green inventory, blends and tax reports at a flat price that ignores how much you roast. It is still the roast side of the business. The same is true of the roast-logging platforms that price on seats and locations rather than volume: they are an honest answer to roast consistency, and no answer at all to a cafe that wants to change its standing order. ## Roast platforms price on the weight you roast The coffee-specific platforms that do carry a wholesale portal charge a monthly fee plus a volume component, either a roasted-weight allowance with a per-pound overage above it, or a static fee plus a per-kilo charge past a threshold. The consequence is the same either way: a good year raises the software bill, and the increase arrives in the month you can least spare the attention. [A flat-fee alternative to RoasterTools](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/roastertools-alternative-for-coffee-roasters) sets out the five published tiers behind that model and the overage rate attached to each. That model has a defensible logic behind it, since a bigger roastery does put more load on the software. It also means the cost of taking an order from a cafe is tied to something that has nothing to do with taking an order from a cafe. [Why wholesale software is so expensive](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/why-is-wholesale-software-so-expensive) covers where the rest of the money goes. ## Ordering software hides its cost in tier gates, not the headline price The entry tier is rarely the tier a wholesale roaster can use. The gates that bite are consistent across the field: - **Recurring orders.** On the leading coffee platform, recurring orders sit on the third tier, above two cheaper plans. The weekly repeat is the single most valuable thing an order desk can do for a roaster, and it is priced as an upgrade. - **Net terms.** Wholesale apps for retail ecommerce routinely place payment terms one tier above the cheapest plan, because the entry plan is aimed at discount pricing rather than trade accounts. - **Volume and tiered discounts.** Often the top tier of a three-tier app. - **Customer-specific pricing.** Cheap plans give you a small number of shared price groups; a price negotiated with one account is an enterprise feature. - **The B2B portal itself.** On inventory platforms and light ERPs, the portal is a paid add-on on top of a per-seat plan, alongside extra users and extra integrations. One model that suits a small roaster is the seat-priced order desk: unlimited orders, customers and products, with the tiers selling admin and sales-rep seats. A one-person wholesale desk stays on the base plan indefinitely. The catch is the seat count rather than the trade, so it costs the same whether you send two orders a week or two hundred. ## Shopify now carries B2B on its standard plans Since April 2026 the Basic, Grow and Advanced plans include company profiles, payment terms, volume pricing and self-serve buyer ordering, capped at three active B2B catalogues assigned through Markets. Unlimited catalogues, assigning a catalogue directly to one company, deposits and partial payments remain on the enterprise plan. A roaster already running retail on Shopify, with three price tiers or fewer and no negotiated rates, has a cheap wholesale route that did not exist two years ago. Where it stops is the coffee-shaped part. Three catalogues does not cover twelve cafes on twelve rates, and retail checkout has no concept of a roast-day deadline: the cart stays open all week and the order lands after the batch is sized. [Charging different prices to different wholesale customers](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/how-to-charge-different-prices-to-different-wholesale-customers) sets out what per-account pricing has to do. ## A roaster with a dozen cafe accounts needs the order desk first Wholesale coffee is roast-to-order, weekly and repetitive. A busy cafe works through 25 to 100 kg a week and reorders close to the same lines each time, 52 weeks a year. The order has to arrive before the roaster fires, not after, because a late order cannot be absorbed from stock the way a dry-goods supplier absorbs one. So the expensive problem is not roast consistency. It is chasing eleven cafes for a Sunday deadline, re-keying an Instagram message into a make list, and roasting the wrong quantity because one account changed its mind on WhatsApp. [What a standing order is in wholesale](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/what-is-a-standing-order-in-wholesale) covers the repeating order that removes most of that. ## Wholesale Handler charges a flat fee for the order side A flat price, with no per-user charge, no per-order charge, no commission on the coffee and no tier holding a feature back - the plans differ only in how many customers you trade with. Up to 3 customers it runs free, without a card. - **A price list per cafe**, set directly or as a percentage of your default list, with rounding controls. Each account sees only its own price, so a house blend or a private-label bag is orderable by the account it belongs to and invisible to everyone else. A price that rose in the last thirty days shows struck through beside the new one while the buyer is ordering. - **Standing orders** from weekly to four-weekly. The order is created at that day's cutoff rather than when the schedule was saved, and it is re-priced at that moment, so a rate change propagates without renegotiating. A line that is unavailable that week is dropped and the cafe is emailed about it. Either side can pause the schedule or skip one delivery from the reminder email without signing in. - **A cutoff per delivery day**, set as a lead time, so Monday's roast can close on Friday evening while Thursday's stays open until the night before. Minimum order values, delivery charges and each customer's own delivery days sit alongside it. - **A production schedule** that totals what has been ordered for a given day and prints a make sheet with a line per product and a checkbox against it. - **Packing slips that carry no prices**, so the sheet in the box tells a barista what arrived without showing what the cafe pays. - **A public storefront**, bulk import of your catalogue and customers, and a CSV export of invoice lines for your accountant. [Flat-fee wholesale ordering software](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/flat-fee-wholesale-ordering-software) explains the pricing model, and [the wholesale customer portal](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/wholesale-customer-portal) covers what a cafe sees when it signs in. ## What Wholesale Handler does not do The boundary is the same one that makes it cheap. It is the order desk and the invoicing, and it stops at the roastery door. - **No green coffee, roast profiles, roast logging, batch tracking or cost per pound.** A roaster who needs lot-to-bag traceability, a roast curve or a green stock forecast is buying a different category of software, and should buy it from that category. The production schedule tells you how many kilos of house espresso Tuesday needs; it does not split that into batches, pull green stock or record what happened in the drum. - **No grind or size variants.** Products carry a name, description and pack size, so a 1 kg whole bean and a 1 kg ground for espresso are two catalogue lines rather than two options on one line. - **Invoices do not raise themselves on a schedule.** You select the orders that have been processed, they collate into one draft invoice per customer, and finalising emails the PDF. That covers the monthly consolidated statement, but it is a deliberate action rather than a cron job. - **No card payments, no automated payment chasing and no credit notes.** Payments are recorded against the invoice, which suits net-7, net-14 and net-30 accounts and means no processor takes a slice of a bag of coffee. A cafe cannot download its own invoice PDF from the portal. - **One sign-in per business.** There are no separate accounts for a wholesale manager and a production lead yet. - **Caps on customers and products.** The plans are sized for a small wholesale book rather than a distributor's, and every ceiling is published rather than discovered. A custom plan carrying higher limits can be set up on request, so a larger operation is worth emailing me about rather than assuming it will not fit. There is also no integration with your roast platform. The two systems run side by side, and the join is the make sheet and the CSV export. [Wholesale ordering software without ERP integration](https://wholesalehandler.com/articles/wholesale-ordering-software-without-erp-integration) covers why that is workable at this size. ## Q&A **Q: Does Artisan take wholesale orders?** A: No. Artisan is a roast scope. It records and controls roast profiles and holds no customers, prices, orders or invoices, so a roaster running Artisan still needs somewhere for the cafe order to land. **Q: What happens if a cafe misses the roast-day deadline?** A: The order form locks for that delivery day and the cafe is told which day it can order for instead. A merchant placing the order on the cafe's behalf is not bound by that rule and can use a free calendar, and every rule set aside is named back at the review step before the order is placed. **Q: Can I sell retail bags through the same system?** A: Only as wholesale accounts. The storefront is a public page, but there is no card checkout, so a direct-to-consumer bag still sells through your retail store. Wholesale Handler covers the trade accounts. **Q: Can a cafe change its own standing order?** A: Yes. Either the cafe or the roaster can change the day of the week, the cadence, the products and the notes on a running schedule, and the pending change is summarised before it is saved. It applies to every delivery from then on. **Q: How does a monthly statement work without automated invoicing?** A: Orders accumulate through the month as they are processed. At month end you select them and they collate into one draft invoice per customer, so a cafe that ordered four times receives a single invoice covering all four, emailed as a PDF when you finalise it.