About Ullage

Ullage is a shared pantry for a household. You tell it what is on the shelf once, and mark things as you buy them; it learns how quickly each thing goes, works out when you will run out, and writes the shopping list before anyone finds the empty packet. Everyone in the house sees the same shelf and the same list.

Why it is called Ullage

Ullage is a winemaking and brewing word. It means the empty space in a container — the headroom left above the wine in a cask or the beer in a bottle. Coopers have measured it for centuries, because the gap is what tells you how much has gone.

That is exactly the subject of this app. A pantry list is usually a list of what you have. This one is really about what is missing: the space that has opened up since the last shop, and how fast it is opening. Naming the app after the gap rather than the contents was the shortest way to say which of the two it pays attention to.

How the prediction works

It learns from your own history and nothing else. For each thing on your shelf, Ullage keeps the gaps between the times you bought it and takes the middle one — the typical interval for that item, in your household. The next date is that interval added to your last purchase.

This means two honest limits, and the app says both out loud rather than hiding them. A brand-new item has no history, so its first guesses are wide; confidence grows as the record does. And a date is always a guess, never a promise — a week with guests will empty the milk early no matter what the median says. Ullage shows how sure it is, and you can overrule it at any point.

There is no shelf-life table, no average household, and no model trained on other people's shopping. Two houses that buy the same rice at different speeds get different dates.

What it does not do

• It does not plan meals or suggest recipes.
• It does not track calories or nutrition.
• It does not watch expiry dates. It predicts how often you buy a thing, which is a different question from when a thing goes off.
• It does not compare prices, and it cannot order anything for you.

Where your pantry lives

On your device. Ullage needs no account and works fully offline — the shelf is stored on the phone or the computer you are using, not on a server. You attach an email address only if you want the pantry to survive a lost phone, or to share it with the people you live with. The privacy page is the long version.

Who makes it

Ullage is built by a small independent team, and it is free. Nothing in it is time-limited, nothing is held back for a paid tier, and there is nothing to buy.

You can use it on the web today, in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese and French. The iPhone and Android apps are built and not yet in the App Store or on Google Play. Questions, bugs and ideas all go to support@ullage.app, and a person reads them.