The frustration that started this
I opened Off Premise in Lincoln Park, Chicago, with a clear vision: a curated bottle shop where every wine, agave, and whiskey on the shelf earned its spot — and where customers could discover something new every week.
What I didn't have was a website to match. I tried the obvious options. Square Online (free with Square POS) was barebones — no real product pages, no SEO depth, no way to do the things a modern customer expects. Shopify was the closest fit, but the math kept getting absurd: $39/mo became $99/mo became $400/mo once I'd added Recharge for the wine club, Klaviyo for email, Privy for popups, Smile for referrals, Zapiet for delivery scheduling. Each plugin was its own contract, its own dashboard, its own thing to break.
None of it actually worked the way I needed. I wanted live Square inventory sync, real customer accounts, club subscriptions that customers could self-manage, the ability to ship to neighboring states without a degree in compliance, and a single dashboard where I could understand the shop's health every morning.
Every platform I tried solved 60% of the problem and left me building the other 40% in spreadsheets.
So I built it
Late at night, after closing the shop, I started writing the storefront I needed. Live Square sync. A real product detail page. A wine club signup that didn't require me to manually enter card info into Square's dashboard for every new member. A win-back automation that knew which customers had actually lapsed instead of bombarding the list.
It took months. Off Premise's site became my testing ground — every feature ran live, on a real shop, with real customers, before I trusted it. By the end I had something better than what I could have bought.
Why I'm offering it to other shops
Once Off Premise stabilized, I started getting messages from other independent shop owners I'd met at industry events: "What CMS are you using? It looks great."
The honest answer was "I built it." That's not a useful answer for them. So I started thinking about how to package what I built into something other shops could actually use without me doing custom work for each one.
Standalone is the result. Same platform that powers Off Premise, deployed for other shops on Square. Your branding, your inventory, your customers — running on the same code, refined every day by what's working at my own shop.
The principles I built around
If you're considering Standalone, this is what I think makes it different from the alternatives.
Built around how Square actually works
Most platforms treat Square as one of many integrations. Standalone is Square-native. Inventory, customers, orders, subscriptions, discounts — all live in Square, all reflected on the site in real time, no double entry.
One bill, no app sprawl
Subscriptions, email automation, customer accounts, referrals, gift cards, abandoned cart — built in. You won't add five $50/mo plugins to get features that should be table stakes.
Curation over scale
I onboard a small number of shops at a time, not hundreds. The math works because each shop is a real conversation, not a ticket in a queue. If you want a self-serve free trial with no human contact, Shopify is your move.
Built by someone who actually runs a shop
Every feature exists because I needed it at Off Premise. The dashboard answers questions I genuinely ask at 9am. The marketing automation fires on the cadence that actually works. The subscription flow is what I wish I'd had when I was manually onboarding club members. I'm the first user of every feature I ship.
Honest about limitations
Standalone is Square-only today. We don't yet integrate with Toast, Clover, or Lightspeed. We don't migrate Recharge subscriptions. We don't migrate order history. We do have a Shopify migration tool. The roadmap is driven by waitlist demand — if your shop is on a different POS, get on the list and tell us; that's how the next integration gets prioritized.
Adam Kamin
Owner, Off Premise Chicago. Founder, Standalone. Spent ten years in tech before opening a bottle shop. Now spends his days curating mezcal and his nights coding.
Reach me directly: adam@offpremisechicago.com · (773) 770-3540
Or come into the shop. 1128 W Armitage Ave. Friday tastings 5–8pm.
What's next
Slow growth. The first ten Standalone shops will get hands-on attention from me directly. After that we'll see — maybe more shops on Square, maybe a Toast integration, maybe a separate B2B fulfillment product for brands looking for curated retail partners.
If you run an independent bottle shop and any of this resonates — join the waitlist. I read every application personally and reply within a couple of days.