If you're looking for a free alternative, you probably have a specific number in your head that you don't want to spend yet. That's fair. So rather than talk you out of it, here's an honest map of what the free options actually do, where each one gives out, and how to tell which side of that line you're on.
A note on the name: Stocksmith was previously called Craftybase. Same team, same product, same data — we renamed as our customers grew from side projects into manufacturing businesses. If you arrived here searching for Craftybase, you're in the right place. Read the full story behind the rename.
There is no free tool that does what Craftybase — now Stocksmith — does, because the expensive part isn't storage or a product list. It's tracking materials through production so your cost per unit stays true as supplier prices move.
What you can do for free is assemble two or three tools that each cover a slice: a spreadsheet for materials, a free inventory app for finished stock, free accounting software for the books. That genuinely works — until the reconciling between them takes longer than the work itself.
The honest test: if you can still tell me what a batch cost you last month without opening three files, you don't need to pay for anything yet.
Each of these is genuinely good at something. None of them is bad software — they're just solving a narrower problem than manufacturing.
Good at: anything, if you're willing to build it. Free, infinitely flexible, and you already know how to use one.
Gives out when: you add a second level to a bill of materials. A product made from materials is a straightforward sheet. A product made from components that are themselves manufactured is where the formulas start to sprawl, and where one wrong cell reference quietly changes every cost downstream of it.
The other cost is manual entry. Every purchase, every batch, every sale gets typed in twice — once where it happened and once in your sheet. That holds fine at ten orders a week and stops holding somewhere around fifty.
Good at: counting finished products, usually with a clean mobile app and a barcode scanner.
Gives out when: you need the layer underneath. Most general inventory tools treat stock as things you buy and resell. They have no concept of a recipe that turns twelve materials into one finished unit, so making a batch is a manual deduction rather than a single action.
Free tiers also cap product counts, which tends to bite exactly when things are going well.
Good at: income, expenses, invoicing, and giving your accountant something to work with.
Gives out when: you need cost of goods sold that reflects what you actually make. Accounting tools record what you spent; they don't know that $400 of raw material became 300 units, of which you sold 180. That calculation is the whole job for a manufacturer, and it's the one thing accounting software leaves to you.
This is the same gap paid accounting software has, incidentally — see where QuickBooks stops for manufacturers.
Free software is free. The stack around it isn't, and the price shows up in three places that are easy to miss because none of them arrive as an invoice.
Time. Manual entry and reconciliation across two or three tools is a few hours a week that you're not spending on production, sales, or rest.
Errors that compound. A spreadsheet mistake doesn't announce itself. It sits in your cost per unit, and every pricing decision you make after that inherits it.
Underpricing. This is the expensive one. If your cost per unit is a number you estimated once rather than one that updates when your supplier raises prices, you are almost certainly charging too little for something — and the products you sell most are the ones where being wrong costs the most.
That's the actual argument for paying for software, and it's worth being precise about it: not that spreadsheets are bad, but that a wrong number gets baked into your pricing, your wholesale agreements, and your reorder quantities — and by the time you notice, those decisions are load-bearing.
We'd rather you stayed on a spreadsheet than paid us for something you don't need yet.
Plans start at $20/month on the Pro plan billed annually ($24/month if you pay monthly). Every plan includes multi-level bills of materials, automatic material deduction on manufacture, and real-time cost per unit — there's no tier where costing is the upsell.
Multi-user access is included rather than priced per seat, which matters if more than one person touches production.
See all plans →14-day free trial. No credit card required.
There isn't a single free tool that replaces it. The closest free setup is a spreadsheet for materials and recipes, a free inventory app for finished stock, and free accounting software for the books. That combination covers most of the ground, but you maintain the joins between them by hand — and the reconciling is what eventually costs more than the software.
Yes. Craftybase is now Stocksmith — same team, same product, same data, new name. The rename reflects who the software is actually for now: small-batch product businesses and manufacturers rather than hobby sellers. Existing accounts carried over unchanged, and nothing about how the product works was altered by the rename.
For a while, yes — and if your recipes are single-level and you sell through one channel, a spreadsheet is genuinely the right tool. The point it stops working is usually multi-level bills of materials: when a product is built from components that are themselves manufactured, the formulas sprawl and a single wrong reference silently changes every cost downstream of it.
Plans start at $20/month on the Pro plan billed annually, or $24/month billed monthly. Multi-level bills of materials, automatic material deduction and real-time unit costing are included on every plan rather than gated to higher tiers, and multi-user access isn't priced per seat. There's a 14-day free trial with no card required.
Usually yes, and that's by design. Stocksmith handles inventory, manufacturing and product costing; your accounting software handles books and tax. Most product businesses run both, with Stocksmith calculating true COGS and inventory valuations that feed into the accounting side. See how the two fit together.
Load two or three of your real recipes and see what your actual cost per unit comes out at. If it matches what you thought, stay on the spreadsheet with our blessing.
Start my free 14-day trial →No credit card required.