The Untappd Price Hike: What It Means for Breweries

The renewal email lands in a brewery owner's inbox once a year, and for the last several years it has carried the same small surprise: the number is bigger than it was. What used to be a tidy $599 line item for digital menus is now, for many accounts, a four-figure annual commitment. Untappd for Business — the software a huge slice of American taprooms use to run their tap-list menus and TV displays — has raised its price more than once, and the way it has done so tells you something about where the company is headed.

This isn't a takedown. Untappd built a genuinely useful product and a consumer check-in app that a lot of drinkers love. But pricing is a fact, and renewal season is the right time to look at the facts clearly.

The five-year climb: $599 to $1,199

Here's the arc, as best it can be reconstructed from Untappd's own pricing pages and contemporaneous industry coverage:

Two moves, five years. The first was blunt: a roughly 50% jump from $599 to $899, applied broadly. The second was subtler and arguably more consequential — not a headline price increase at all, but a restructuring that introduced a higher ceiling and quietly redefined what the old price bought.

That's the move worth understanding, because it's the one that affects existing customers most.

How tiering raises prices without "raising the price"

When Untappd split into Essentials and Premium, it didn't just add a fancier option above the old plan. It put limits on the plan most breweries were already on.

Untappd for Business Essentials, at $899/year, caps an account at five users and a maximum of 20 non-beer menu items — food, wine, spirits, cider, merch, anything that isn't a beer. Premium, at $1,199/year, removes those caps (unlimited users, unlimited items), adds the Wine-Searcher database for non-beer entries, and unlocks API access.

For a beer-only nanobrewery with two people managing the menu, Essentials is fine. But think about who doesn't fit inside those caps: a brewpub with a full kitchen menu, a taproom that also pours wine and cocktails for the non-beer crowd, or any operation where more than five people touch the tap list across shifts. Those breweries were doing all of that on the old single plan. Under the new structure, doing the same thing they were already doing means moving up to $1,199.

That's the mechanism. The list price of "Untappd for Business" didn't have to climb again, because the tiers do the climbing for you. It's a well-worn SaaS pattern: raise the floor once loudly, then let feature-gating walk customers up the stack quietly.

What's driving it

None of this happens in a vacuum. Untappd is owned by Next Glass, a craft-beverage company that has spent the last several years assembling a portfolio — the beer-rating community BeerAdvocate, the media outlet Hop Culture, the e-commerce platform Oznr, and the brewery management software maker Ekos, among others. Next Glass has also taken on significant growth-equity backing.

That context matters because it shapes incentives. A bootstrapped tools company can be content charging a flat fee forever. A venture- or growth-equity-backed roll-up generally needs rising recurring revenue per customer — that's the math the model runs on. Tiered pricing, premium add-ons, and periodic increases aren't villainy; they're the predictable output of that ownership structure. Understanding it is more useful than being annoyed by it, because it tells you what to expect next: the pressure points only push one direction.

How breweries are responding

It would be easy to manufacture outrage here, but the honest picture is more measured. In brewery-owner forums and craft-industry groups, the recurring themes when Untappd pricing comes up are familiar ones: sticker-shock at renewal, frustration that a full food-and-wine menu now effectively requires the top tier, and the perennial complaint about TV-display reliability dropping out during a busy service. Multi-location operators voice a sharper version: because Untappd licenses per location, opening, closing, or relocating a site can mean buying a fresh location outright — with little flexibility on refunds when a taproom you just renewed goes dark. For a five-site group, those per-location renewals stack up fast. Competitors have noticed — at least one menu-software rival now markets directly against the increases, using Untappd's own price history as a selling point.

But churn in this category is sticky for a reason. Switching menu software means re-entering your tap list, re-training staff, and giving up whatever consumer-app visibility you had. A lot of breweries grumble and renew. That inertia is real, and it's worth naming, because the price increases work precisely because switching feels like a hassle. Which means the question isn't "is everyone leaving Untappd?" — they're not — it's "am I still getting $1,199 of value, or am I paying the convenience tax on not having looked?"

The alternatives landscape

If you do decide to look, the field is healthier than it was a few years ago. There are menu-first tools that compete mainly on price and simplicity, broader hospitality platforms that serve restaurants and bars as well as taprooms, and brewery operating platforms that fold menus and displays into a larger toolset. Each makes a different trade between cost, reliability, branding control, and whether you actually need a consumer discovery network attached to your menu.

The right pick depends entirely on what you're solving for. If you want maximum drinker discoverability and you're happy in the Untappd ecosystem, staying may be the correct call. If you mostly need menus and TV displays that don't blink out mid-rush, you may be overpaying for a network you don't lean on. For a full breakdown of who fits where, see our roundup of the best Untappd alternatives for breweries. And if the renewal has you rethinking more than menus, it's worth reading how the POS systems underneath your taproom compare on customer data while you're at it.

What to watch next

Two things are worth keeping an eye on as your next renewal approaches.

First, what moves to Premium-only. The features still bundled into Essentials today — within those five-user and 20-item caps — are exactly the features most likely to get gated upward in a future restructuring. If something you rely on is sitting in the lower tier, don't assume it stays there.

Second, your own usage. Before you renew, pull up what you're actually using: how many displays, how many menu items, how many logins, and whether anyone has touched the API. The gap between what you pay for and what you use is the whole ballgame. A four-figure tool that you lean on every day is a bargain. A four-figure tool running one TV in the corner is a renewal worth questioning.

The price hikes themselves aren't a scandal. They're a signal — that the cost of running your tap list is now a real operating-expense decision, not a rounding error. Treat your renewal like one.

FAQ

(See the schema-ready FAQ block at the end of the page — it covers current Untappd for Business pricing, the increase timeline, the Essentials-vs-Premium split, what's driving the changes, alternatives, and whether to expect another hike.)