Equipment you scan, book and hand over
Shelf keeps the register of a team's physical gear: laptops, cameras, tools, vehicles, props, stock. Each item carries a QR label that any phone can scan to open its record, check it out or report a problem. The team knows where every item sits and who has it, and bookings stop the same piece of equipment from being promised twice for the same slot.
Bulk scanning, kits and per-location stock
- A kit bundles a laptop, its charger and its dock, and Shelf then handles the three as one item.
- The built-in scanner reads QR codes and barcodes and applies one action to a whole batch: assign custody, move to a location, add to a booking. Every scan lands in the item's history.
- Since 2.4.0, quantity-tracked stock records each change along with where it happened.
- Five roles split the permissions: Owner, Administrator, Manager, Base and Self Service. A Manager runs bookings, custody and audits for everyone but cannot edit the catalogue.
- Locations nest (building, floor, room, shelf) and take GPS coordinates. A retired item can be archived and keeps its history.
- CSV import runs as a resumable background job, and its column-mapping review takes a spreadsheet exported from another tool as it is.
Camera rooms, laptop fleets and job-site tools
- A film crew's gear, booked for a shoot and checked out as kits.
- A university or school equipment desk, where Self Service borrowers book and take custody for themselves.
- A company laptop fleet, with serial number and warranty as custom fields and a reminder before it expires.
- Tools spread across several sites, found by location.
Supabase required, phone app licensed separately
Self-hosting Shelf means pointing it at a Supabase project. Supabase provides the PostgreSQL database, authentication and file storage, and the Docker image does not bundle it. The Supabase setup guide has you create four storage buckets by hand and requires an SMTP server for auth emails. Docker support is a community effort the company does not officially back. For a home inventory, Homebox goes the other way, with SQLite and an embedded web UI.
The Shelf Companion phone app is not open source. The repository is AGPL-3.0 except for apps/companion/, released under the PolyForm Internal Use License 1.0.0: a company may read and modify it for internal use, but not distribute it. Connecting the app to a self-hosted server takes a "private-server" license billed monthly, and Shelf has to register the domain first.
Features sold on Shelf Cloud unlock with one setting. With ENABLE_PREMIUM_FEATURES=false, a self-hosted instance stops asking for a subscription and opens every feature to every user. The .env.example file the README tells you to copy during setup ships it as true, though. On the hosted service, bookings come with the Team plan, and reports with Plus and Team.
The company steers most teams to its cloud. Its open source page pitches self-hosting at organizations with strict data residency or compliance requirements, and says the vast majority of its teams use the hosted version. The same page faults other open source tools in the field for being either enterprise platforms that take a long time to set up or bare spreadsheet replacements.
Releases ship often. Version 2.0.0 came out on 3 July 2026 and 2.4.0 on 23 October, eleven releases in under four months. 2.4.0 is a security release that moves to Node.js 24, and the maintainers ask every self-hosted operator to upgrade. Last commit: 26 October 2026.