Craftybase moved to $99 a month: options for small makers
On July 1, 2026, Craftybase rebranded to Stocksmith and repositioned itself upmarket. The entry plan, now called Indie, costs $99 a month. For years Craftybase was the default answer whenever a candle, soap, or jewelry maker asked how to track raw materials alongside a Shopify store, and a big part of that was the price. That part has changed, and a lot of small makers are now doing math on a subscription that costs more than some of them clear in a slow month.
This guide covers what actually happened to the pricing, what the realistic alternatives are, and the honest limits of each one. None of these tools is bad. The goal is to match what you make and sell to what you pay.
The pricing history, verified
- Before 2024, Craftybase's entry pricing sat at roughly $19 to $20 a month.
- In 2024, the entry price moved to $49 a month.
- On July 1, 2026, Craftybase became Stocksmith, and the entry plan became Indie at $99 a month.
That is roughly a fivefold increase at the entry level in a few years. To be fair to the company, this looks like a deliberate strategy rather than drift: the rebrand and the pricing together signal a move toward larger, more established manufacturing businesses. Companies are allowed to do that, and if your operation has grown into their new target market, staying put may be the right call.
The consequence for everyone else is simple: the sub-$50 band that Craftybase used to serve is now vacant. If you are a part-time maker or a small full-time one, you are no longer who this product is priced for, and it is worth looking around.
Before comparing tools, write down what you need
Materials tracking for makers usually comes down to six things:
- A list of raw materials with quantities on hand and what you paid.
- Recipes, meaning a bill of materials for each finished product.
- Production runs that subtract materials and add finished stock when you make a batch.
- Unit conversions, because you buy wax by the pound and use it by the gram.
- Low stock alerts with reorder points, in material units.
- A cost per finished unit, so pricing decisions rest on real numbers.
Rank these for your own business before reading on. The alternatives below differ mostly in which of the six they skip.
The alternatives, with their real limits
Assemblified: $6 to $12 a month
Launched in August 2025, Assemblified holds 5.0 stars across 24 reviews on the Shopify App Store. It is young, cheap, and well liked so far, and it covers the basic linking of components to finished products. What it lacks, as of this writing: unit conversions, cost rollup, and low stock alerts. If you buy and use materials in the same unit, keep costs in a spreadsheet, and can check your shelves by eye, it may genuinely be enough, and it costs less per month than a bag of wax.
Materials Inventory: effectively $89 a month for makers
Materials Inventory has 5.0 stars but only 51 reviews in about five and a half years, so it is a small, steady app. The catch is where the features sit. The components feature, which is the part that links raw materials to finished products and is the whole point for a maker, lives on the $89 a month tier. One reviewer put it plainly in August 2024: they "can't justify the $89/mo". For maker use, its real price lands close to Stocksmith's new entry plan.
Katana: advertised at $299 a month, realistically more
Katana is full manufacturing software, and the pricing reflects it. The advertised plan is $299 a month, but lot tracking is a $249 a month add-on and bin locations cost another $149 a month, so the realistic floor for a business that needs those is $548 to $1,000 or more per month. Between 2024 and 2026, named long-time customers publicly churned over metric-based price jumps. If you have employees, multiple locations, and compliance requirements, evaluate it seriously. If you make candles at a workbench, it is the wrong size of tool.
StockHero
A short caution here: StockHero's own developer publicly states that the app has no reorder thresholds and refers users to a separate alerts app for that. Reorder points are core to materials tracking, so if you go this route, budget for the second app and the glue between them.
A spreadsheet
Free, flexible, and workable at small scale. Its failure modes are manual subtraction after every batch and unit conversions done by hand, which is exactly where tired humans make mistakes. We cover the approach in detail, including the point where it stops working, in how to track raw materials for a Shopify store.
Where Madestock fits
Full disclosure: Madestock, which we are building, is aimed at exactly the band Stocksmith vacated. It is in development now. The design: raw materials tracked as records inside the app rather than as products cluttering your Shopify catalog, recipes per finished product, production runs that subtract materials and add finished stock with an audit trail, unit conversions, low stock alerts with reorder points, and a live cost rollup per finished unit with the math shown. It imports materials and recipes from a Craftybase or Stocksmith CSV export, so switching does not mean retyping your whole materials list. The free tier covers up to 10 materials and 3 recipes with every feature included, and the Maker plan is $29 a month flat, backed by a written flat-price promise. Given that pricing history is probably why you are reading this article, we think that promise belongs in writing.
What to do this week
- Export your data while your account is active. Download CSV exports of your materials and recipes from Craftybase or Stocksmith today, whatever you decide later. Every option above gets easier with a clean export in hand.
- Score the alternatives against your ranked list of the six needs. An app missing your top two needs is expensive at any price.
- Match the tool to your scale, and revisit yearly. The right answer at 10 products differs from the right answer at 200, and this market clearly shifts fast.
The uncomfortable truth in all of this is that the old default option no longer exists at the old price. The useful response is a clear-eyed look at what you actually need, then paying for that and nothing more.