About Bean Counter
Bean Counter compares speciality coffee from 91 independent UK roasters in one place: price per kilo, origins, processes, tasting notes, delivery costs and discount codes. It's free to use and you don't need an account to browse.
Why the name? A bean counter is someone who fusses over every penny, and that's exactly what this site does with coffee: it works out the price per kilo of every bag, adds the delivery, and checks the discount codes, so you can spend your time drinking the stuff instead.
How we collect the data
- Once a day, early in the morning, our crawler reads each roaster's public shop catalogue: the product feed that Shopify and WooCommerce shops publish, or the product information shops add to their pages for search engines. We don't log in, create baskets or read anything that isn't public.
- It respects robots.txt (including crawl delays), identifies itself as
CoffeeBeansProfilerBot, asks for one page at a time with a pause between requests, and stops if a site turns it away. - Delivery prices, free-delivery thresholds, dispatch times and offers come from each roaster's delivery or FAQ pages and the banner on their home page.
- We keep facts (prices, sizes, origins, tasting notes) and a short excerpt of each description, and link to the roaster for the rest. Product photos are shown straight from the roaster's own site, not copied.
- Roasters come from a hand-picked list plus coffee roasters mapped on OpenStreetMap. Only shops that sell coffee beans online in pounds sterling are listed.
How accurate is it?
- Prices and stock are as they were at our last daily check, so they can be out of date by the time you look. If we can't reach a shop, we keep showing its coffees for up to a week, marked with the date we last checked them. Always check the price, delivery cost and any code on the roaster's site before you buy.
- Origins, processes, roast levels, tasting notes and delivery terms are read automatically from the roasters' own wording. Some will be missing and a few will be wrong. Where a roaster doesn't list tasting notes we pick them out of the description, and say so on the coffee's page.
- Price per kilo is worked out from the bag size, using whole-bean bags where there's a choice. Delivery isn't included, which is why each coffee page also shows the roaster's delivery terms.
- Discount codes are copied with the sentence they came from, so you can judge them. They may have expired or have conditions.
If something looks wrong, the roaster's own site is the one to trust.
Buying
We don't sell coffee. Buy links go straight to the roaster's own shop, and you order, pay and get support from them. "Quick checkout" links put the bag you chose straight into the roaster's basket, where the shop supports it. We add utm_source=coffeebeansprofiler to these links so roasters can see that a visit came from us. We don't earn commission on them at the moment; if that changes, we'll say so here.
Accounts and recommendations
An account is optional. Sign in with Google or an email address to rate the coffees you've tried, and the site suggests others that match your taste. Recommendations are worked out in your browser from your ratings. If you never sign in, nothing from our sign-in provider is loaded. See the privacy notice for what we store and how to download or delete it.
For roasters
You're listed because your shop publishes its catalogue publicly, and every link sends customers straight to you.
Not listed yet and would like to be? Suggest your roastery.
You can opt out at any time: add these lines to your robots.txt and your listing disappears after our next daily check.
User-agent: CoffeeBeansProfilerBot
Disallow: /Credits
Some roasters were found using data from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. Coffee names, descriptions and photos belong to the roasters.