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DuckHouse

For coffee shops

Know what sells, hour by hour.
And what it costs to make.

Your sales are in Square, your hours are in timecards, your beans sell on Shopify and your costs live in a spreadsheet. DuckHouse puts them in one place and keeps them up to date, so the question you have on a slow Tuesday has an answer.

Get started How it works

Works with Square, Shopify, Stripe and Google Sheets.

A barista pours steamed milk into takeaway cups behind a café counter.

Which hour was busiest last Saturday, and how many people were on shift?

Read square.orders, square.timecards

10am was the busiest hour: 148 orders, with 4 people on shift. Orders halved after 1pm, but 4 stayed on until 3.

An example answer. The business and its numbers are made up.

Questions you can answer

The things you’ve always wanted to know.

Each of these comes from data your tools already have. DuckHouse puts it side by side.

“What are my busiest hours on each day of the week, and am I staffed for them?”

Square orders by the hour, beside the timecards for the same shifts.

Square

“Which items get ordered together, so I know what to bundle?”

The line items on every Square order.

Square

“What did labour cost as a share of sales last week, shift by shift?”

Hours and hourly rates from Square timecards, against Square payments.

Square

“Do subscribers still come in to the café?”

Stripe subscriptions matched to Square customers by email.

StripeSquare

“What does each drink cost me to make, against what it sells for?”

Your cost sheet beside your Square menu and sales.

Google SheetsSquare

How it works

Three steps, no data team.

You keep using the tools you have. DuckHouse gathers what they know.

  1. 1. Create a database

    It runs on its own machine with its own storage. There is nothing to install.

  2. 2. Connect your tools

    Sign in or paste a key for each one. DuckHouse only reads from them, brings in your history, then keeps up, as often as every 15 minutes for Square.

  3. 3. Ask in plain English

    Connect Claude or ChatGPT to DuckHouse and ask: “Which hour was busiest last Saturday, and how many people were on shift?” It looks in your data and answers. How to connect an assistant.

What it connects

The tools you already use.

What DuckHouse brings in from each, and how you connect it.

Square

Orders and what was in them, payments and tips, staff timecards, your menu and inventory counts.

Paste an access token from Square’s Developer Console. New data comes in as often as every 15 minutes.

How to connect Square

Shopify

Online orders for beans and merchandise, customers and products.

Create an app in Shopify’s Dev Dashboard and paste its client ID and secret. New data comes in as often as every 15 minutes.

How to connect Shopify

Stripe

Subscriptions, if you sell a coffee club or memberships.

Paste a read-only (restricted) key from your Stripe dashboard. New data comes in as often as every 15 minutes.

How to connect Stripe

Google Sheets

The sheet where you keep what each drink, bag or pastry costs you.

Share the sheet with DuckHouse. Every tab becomes a table. New data comes in as often as every 15 minutes.

How to connect Google Sheets

An example

Pondside Coffee

Pondside is the made-up café in our blog: a Square till, a Shopify store for beans, a Stripe coffee club and a Google Sheet of costs.

  1. 1

    The owner connects Square, Shopify and Stripe one afternoon, and shares the costs sheet. History comes in first, then new sales every 15 minutes.

  2. 2

    On Monday they ask Claude whether the Saturday rush is growing or just seasonal. Claude reads the order tables in DuckHouse and answers with a week-by-week comparison.

  3. 3

    Before ordering more beans they ask which bags earn the most after cost, from the Shopify orders and the costs sheet together.

Read Pondside’s story on the blog
Hands pouring latte art into a white cup.
Photos by Eilis Garvey and Brooke Cagle on Unsplash.

What it costs

Pay for the hours it runs.

The smallest database is $0.0117 an hour while it runs. Left on all month with its 10 GB disk, it comes to $10.80. Set it to stop when idle and you pay for the hours it is awake, plus the disk. Data kept in object storage is $0.02 per GB a month.

Every sync wakes the database, so one synced every 15 minutes is awake most of the day. Syncing every hour, or once a day, lets it sleep in between, and you can change that per connection whenever you like.

See full pricing

Questions

Before you start.

Do I need to know SQL?
No. Connect Claude or ChatGPT to DuckHouse and ask in plain English; it writes the query and shows you the answer. If you or your bookkeeper know SQL, the dashboard has a query console too.
Will DuckHouse change anything in my other tools?
No. Connections only read. DuckHouse copies your data into your own database and never writes back to Square, QuickBooks, Shopify, Stripe or anything else.
Who can see my data?
Your database runs on its own machine with its own storage, and only people you invite to your organization can open it. AI assistants reach it only after someone in your organization signs them in, and they can only read unless you allow more.
Can my bookkeeper or manager use it too?
Yes. Invite them to your organization and they can ask questions of the same data.
What if my software isn’t listed?
Most business software can export CSV files. Save them to an SFTP or FTP folder and DuckHouse loads them on a schedule, or keep the data in a Google Sheet. PostgreSQL and MySQL databases connect directly.
What does it cost?
The smallest database is $0.0117 an hour while it runs. Left on all month with its 10 GB disk, it comes to $10.80. Set it to stop when idle and you pay for the hours it is awake, plus the disk. Data kept in object storage is $0.02 per GB a month. There are no contracts or minimums.

Put your numbers in one place.

No contracts and no minimums. Connect the tools you use, and stop the database whenever you like.

Get started Other businesses