BottleCount is a planning console for people who actually host the party — the friend who buys the booze, sets the budget and works the door. It turns "how much do we need?" into an exact, costed shopping list, then helps you fill the room.

It is built to stay simple. The big tools drown you in menus; BottleCount is four steps — Plan, Menu, Shopping, Guests — and a handful of sliders.

Every guest is assumed to drink a fixed amount of pure alcohol — the "ml per guest" you choose with the vibe (25 soft → 100 hardcore). That total is split by your menu percentages, then converted to real bottles using each drink's ABV and recipe.

Each catalogue item carries a low and high price, so totals are shown as a range. Revenue is tickets × price; profit subtracts the drinks and your fixed costs (venue + equipment).

Break-even is the headcount where ticket revenue covers your fixed costs given the per-guest drink margin.

Hit Send invite and BottleCount creates a link you can share anywhere. Whoever opens it types their own name and taps yes or no — no account, no app. You never type a guest in.

Everyone who opens the link is counted as reached, including the ones who look and never answer: those are your maybes, shown faded against your capacity so you can read the room. The rest land as confirmed or declined. If you set a capacity cap, confirmations stop there — though people can still tell you they can't come.

When you allow forwarding, a guest who confirms gets a link of their own. The spread view groups people into tiers — you, your direct invites, and friends-of-friends — and shows a spread factor: the average number of extra people each direct invite brought in.

Invite links and the funnel need a server to work, so they are part of the hosted and self-hosted plans. Turning the link off stops it working for anyone still holding it.

Open Co-organisers in the party header and send the link it gives you. Whoever opens it signs in and can then edit the party from their own device — the menu, the budget, the guest list. Changes show up on your screen within a few seconds.

You don't have to take turns. Edits to different things merge, so one of you can build the menu while the other works the numbers. If you both change the same figure, the later one wins — the same as two people typing into one box.

Co-organisers can do everything except take the party away from you: they can't delete it, close an invite link you opened, or add and remove people. They also don't pay — the party is yours.

Open the scanner and point it at a guest's QR. It checks the signature, the party and the expiry, then lets them in — or tells you why not. It keeps working with no signal once the party has loaded.

Every ticket also has a five-character code, printed on it and short enough to read across a noisy doorway. When a QR won't scan — cracked screen, dead battery, a screenshot of a screenshot — type the code and the guest's name instead. Both have to match: the code on its own is short enough that someone could overhear it.

On the hosted and self-hosted plans you can put more than one phone on the door. They share a single check-in list, so a ticket that got someone in at the front can't get someone else in at the back — the second phone tells you when the first one scanned it. Waved someone through by mistake? Undo it and they can be scanned again.