MadeKeeper is inventory and pricing software for quilters.
You buy fabric by the yard and the fat quarter, batting by the roll, and longarm time by the job. The finished quilt carries every one of those lines, so you know what it really cost.
Free tools, no signup: the fair profit calculator.
free to start, and no card to start. No order-line meters, ever.
$19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. No card to start — MadeKeeper asks for one when you subscribe, not before. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
Quilting & sewing, specifically
Same books underneath — the numbers below are the ones that change.
Embroidery
An embroidered hoop is the cheapest materials list in fiber — floss at 68 cents a skein, a fat quarter, the hoop it ships in — and one of the most labor-heavy things sold at any market. Pricing by materials is how hoop art ends up at $25. MadeKeeper counts the skeins, then puts your stitching hours where buyers can't argue with them: in the number.
Say you finish a 6-inch botanical hoop:
- 9 skeins of floss @ 68¢$6.12
- 6" display hoop$1.85
- Fabric (one fat quarter)$2.20
- Backing felt and hanger$0.60
At $58 you keep $47.23 before fees — and the eight hours of stitching paid $5.90 an hour. That's the number that argues for $75 better than any caption about handmade taking time.
T-shirt quilts
A t-shirt quilt is a commission business: the customer hands you thirty shirts and a shoebox of feelings, and you supply everything that makes it a quilt — interfacing on every knit block, backing, batting, binding, and the hours. The shirts cost you nothing; the quilt costs plenty. MadeKeeper keeps both facts straight, deposit to delivery.
Say you take a 30-shirt queen commission:
- 30 shirts, customer-supplied$0.00
- 8 yds fusible interfacing @ $3.60/yd$28.80
- 4 yds flannel backing @ $9.99/yd$39.96
- Queen batting$24.99
- Thread and binding$6.40
At a $425 commission with $150 down, you keep $324.85 before your hours — and the eighteen hours it took paid $18.05 each. Quote from that number in April, when the graduation calls start.
You buy fabric in yards and fat quarters, batting by the roll, and thread by the spool — and somewhere between the flimsy and the longarm, nobody wrote down what that quilt actually cost. Your stash is real money sitting on shelves. MadeKeeper counts it, costs it, and tells you what each finished quilt made you.
How MadeKeeper maps to your sewing room
MadeKeeper logs fabric by the yard and precuts by the piece
Log bolts in yards and fat quarters as fat quarters. Each quilt's recipe pulls the right amounts down, so the stash count stays honest — and a destash gets priced from what you actually paid.MadeKeeper costs a quilt from its own fabric list
Top, backing, batting, binding, thread, and the longarm bill if you send it out — set it once and every quilt of that pattern carries its true cost the day you finish it.MadeKeeper counts a half-finished top as inventory
A flimsy waiting for quilting is money already spent. MadeKeeper knows the difference between a UFO on the shelf and a finished quilt ready for the fair table.MadeKeeper puts booth, Etsy and commission in one ledger
A quilt sold at the guild show, one sold on Etsy, and a T-shirt quilt commission all land in the same books — with the was-this-show-worth-it math on every fair.One throw quilt, to the penny
Say you finish a 60" × 70" throw:
- 9 yds quilting cotton (top + backing) @ $12.99/yd$116.91
- Throw-size batting$14.99
- Piecing and quilting thread$4.50
- Longarm service, 4,200 sq in @ 2.5¢$105.00
Price it at $425 and you kept $183.60 before fees — a real number to hold up the next time someone at the fair asks why a handmade quilt isn't $80.
If you make baby quilts, MadeKeeper keeps the materials and batch records that CPSIA paperwork asks about — in the app instead of a binder.
Market Saturday, for quilters
The bench is one half of it. MadeKeeper follows quilters out to the booth as well: it opens on one bar of signal, rings a sale in taps and files it against that day's event, holds that sale on the phone if the signal quits and puts it through when the bars come back, reads the tag you printed, and prints a market-day sheet before you load the truck.
None of that is a card reader. Quilters take payment however they already take it; MadeKeeper only keeps the count honest while you sell. Everything it does at the booth →
Straight about what's live
Materials and true cost per piece, batch "makes" with your labor amortized in, the suggested-price coach, product variants, sales that drain stock, the market-day quick-sale screen, lot tracking, the was-this-fair-worth-it event math, money-insight reports, multi-location consignment, the cure/best-by heads-up engine, mileage, expenses, and the Schedule C tax packet are all in the app today, with guided setup and a full Craftybase history migration to get you started. So are Etsy order sync, Square card sync, your own shop page, a Buy button on your own Square account, and custom-order requests off a piece you already sold. On the $24 MadeKeeper AI plan you also get receipts, shelves and recipe cards read from a photo — photo reads are on that plan; hand entry is how the $19 shop starts. Still building: your own books answered in plain words, buying a shipping label inside the app, and a best-customers report. MadeKeeper does not send marketing email to your buyers and is not going to: every maker here sends from one shared reputation, and a quote that has to arrive matters more than a mailing list. Nothing above is dressed up as done when it is not. See the full live-vs-building list →
Questions quilters ask
Can MadeKeeper track my existing stash?
Yes. Enter fabric in yards or fat quarters at what you paid (or a fair estimate for the mystery pieces), and every quilt recipe draws it down from there. A destash sale logs like any other sale, so the money comes back onto the books.
How do I handle longarm costs?
If you send tops out, add the longarm bill to that quilt's recipe as a line item. If you longarm your own, log thread and batting as materials and your machine time stays your labor — visible in the profit-per-hour math on every sale.
Does it work for commissions like T-shirt quilts?
Yes. Log the commission as its own piece with its own recipe — including materials the customer supplied at zero cost — and MadeKeeper shows what the job actually paid you for the hours it took.
Is floss even worth tracking at 68 cents a skein?
One skein, no. A drawer of two hundred, restocked every month, yes — and the point isn't the pennies anyway. It's that every hoop gets an honest cost so the price conversation can be about your hours, which are the real product.
How do custom hoops work?
A commissioned piece — wedding date, pet portrait in thread, a baby's birth stats — logs with its own materials and hours, plus the deposit when you take one. You'll see whether customs out-earn ready-mades per hour, not per warm feeling.
Can I track patterns I sell as PDFs too?
Yes — a digital pattern is a product with near-zero material cost, and its sales land in the same ledger. Watching pattern income beside hoop income tells you where your month actually came from.
How do I track shirts that belong to the customer?
They log as client property on the job — counted, dated, zero cost. If a customer ever asks in October about shirts dropped off in June, the answer is in the app, not in a pile you have to go count.
What about deposits?
Log the deposit when the shirts arrive and the balance stays attached to the commission. Your books show real money in, real balance due — and quilts don't leave until the ledger says paid.
How should I price different sizes?
Cost a lap, a twin, and a queen honestly for a season — the materials scale, but the hours scale harder. Most t-shirt quilters find the small quilts pay worse per hour than they look; the numbers will show you yours.
Ready to see your real numbers?
The app is live. $19/mo, kept for as long as you stay.