Coffee beans · for home coffee drinkers who buy whole-bean specialty coffee
BeanShelf is a coffee bean inventory app for people who buy whole-bean specialty coffee by the bag and keep a few going at once. You type the roast date printed on the bag, and a freshness window gauge lights up on that bag's card: a degassing band, a peak band and a fading band, with a marker on today that moves forward every day. Put a bag in the freezer and its window pauses until you take it out. When your last bag runs low, an optional reminder tells you to order the next one early enough for it to rest.
Type the roast date from the bag and its gauge lights up right away: a band for degassing, one for the peak and one for the slow fade, with a marker on today. Every day the marker moves on, the stretch you have passed dims, and the peak that is left gets shorter. A plain label says where the bag is, for example day 7 of the peak.
Move a bag to the freezer and its gauge frosts over once, then the day count holds where it was. Take it out and the count picks up from that point, with a short note suggesting you drink it soon. The pause stays on the gauge as a break in the band, so you can always see that the bag spent time frozen.
Tap Full, Half or Low when you notice a bag going down; no scale needed. BeanShelf turns those taps into a pace, such as empty around Oct 3, and if you switch reminders on it tells you when to order. The timing allows for the few days of rest new beans need after roasting, and the lock-screen text never names the roaster or the coffee.
Specialty roasters print a roast date on the bag, and people who buy that way often have several bags going at once: one open on the counter, one waiting its turn, one or two in the freezer for later. The questions that come up are always the same. When was this one roasted? Is the new bag ready yet? Which one should I open first?
Today the answers live on the bags themselves, a sticky note on the fridge, or a spreadsheet that stops being updated after the second week. Some coffee apps can store beans, but as a side feature next to their real job. Nobody wants to count days from a date on a crumpled bag, and the bag in the freezer is out of sight entirely. BeanShelf keeps every bag on one shelf and does the day counting for you.
The first screen is the shelf: one card per bag, each with a small version of its gauge, so opening the app shows the freshness of everything you own at a glance. The default order is what to drink next. Bags in their peak and open bags whose window is closing come first; bags that are still degassing wait further down. Frozen bags sit in their own freezer section.
You can filter by state, by roaster or by the freezer, and the top of the shelf counts how many bags you have and how many are at peak. That is all it counts. There are no streaks, goals or nudges about how much coffee you drank this week.
A bag needs the roaster and the roast date; everything else is optional. You can add the coffee's name, the origin, the bag size in grams or ounces, and a roast level of light, medium or dark, which stretches or shortens the window a little. Roasters you have used before are suggested as you type, and buying the same coffee again is one tap that copies the previous bag.
When you open a bag, mark it opened. From then on the card shows a second, shorter open-bag window alongside the roast window, and whichever closes first becomes the main signal. If a bag has no roast date at all, choose that option and BeanShelf counts from the day you bought it, with the gauge marked as an estimate.
Mark a bag as finished and it moves from the shelf to your history. The history is grouped in a way that helps the next purchase: how many bags you have had from each roaster and how many days a bag usually lasts you. Add again copies a finished bag back onto the shelf, so you only type the new roast date.
Everything you entered can be corrected later. Change a roast date or an opened date and the gauge redraws, fix a freezer entry, step the amount left back up, undo a finished bag or delete it outright.
There is no account and no sign-in, and BeanShelf makes no network requests at all. The only permission it ever asks for is notifications, and only when you turn on the reorder or peak reminders. Reminder text on the lock screen stays neutral, such as a bag on your shelf reaching its peak, with no roaster or coffee names.
Your whole shelf and history can be exported as a single file through the share sheet and imported back on a new phone. Settings also has one option to delete all data, which clears the shelf and any scheduled reminders together.
BeanShelf is about the beans you have, not how you make the coffee or how it was roasted. There are no extraction tools, no roast curve or crack timing, and no tasting scores or flavor wheel. It does not scan barcodes, track prices or link to shops.
The freshness window is a general guideline drawn from common coffee practice, and every gauge says so. A bag past its peak is described as fading, which is about aroma, never as spoiled, and the app never tells you to throw coffee away. Treating frozen time as paused is likewise a common convention among coffee drinkers, not a lab measurement of your bag.
BeanShelf's freshness windows describe flavor, not food safety. They are general guidelines that vary by coffee and roast level, and your roaster's advice for a specific coffee comes first.
It is a general guideline drawn from common roaster and home coffee practice: a short degassing stretch after roasting, a peak, then a long fade. Roast level shifts it a little. It is not a measurement of your particular bag, so if your coffees tend to peak later you can shift the whole window in Settings.
Choose the no roast date option when you add it. BeanShelf counts from the day you bought the bag instead and marks the gauge as an estimate, so you can still sort and plan with it.
BeanShelf follows the common practice of treating sealed, frozen beans as paused. The day count stops while the bag is in the freezer section and resumes from the same point when you take it out. It is a convention, not a guarantee, which is why the app suggests drinking thawed beans soon.
No. Past the peak, the card says the aroma is fading. Older beans are still coffee you can drink, and whether a cup tastes good is your call.
No. There is no account, the app works fully offline, and nothing you enter leaves your phone unless you export a backup file yourself.
Yes. Export your shelf and history as a file from Settings, keep it wherever you like, and import it on the new phone to restore everything.
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