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Craftybase vs MadeKeeper: A Price Breakdown

The honest dollar-for-dollar math: what Stocksmith costs now, what MadeKeeper's $19 covers, what it doesn't yet, and who should stay put.

MadeKeeper · July 31, 2026

People leaving Craftybase usually ask the same practical question: is a $19 tool actually enough, or am I trading down to save a few dollars? Fair question. Here's the honest price-and-value math — what Stocksmith costs now, what MadeKeeper costs, what each genuinely does that the other doesn't, and who should stay put. No spin. The case only lands if it's true.

What Stocksmith actually costs now

Craftybase rebranded to Stocksmith in July 2026, and its published plans run like this:

Those figures are straight off the Stocksmith pricing page. Notice two things. There is a cheap plan — Pro at $20 — so it's not true that Craftybase priced everyone out. But Pro is capped to a single sales channel, and the plans above it are metered by order lines per month. That's the tell. It's a ladder built for a business that's growing in volume, and it's priced accordingly.

Where the $20 plan stops fitting

Here's the part that matters for most makers who've been at it a while. If you sell on Etsy, and at a couple of fairs, and off your own website, you're a multi-channel seller — and the $20 Pro plan is a single-channel plan. To cover the way you actually sell, you're on Studio at $49/mo, not $20. Not because your business got big. Just because it got spread across the normal places makers sell.

So the real comparison for a typical multi-channel maker isn't $19 versus $20. It's $19 versus $49, and up from there if your order count climbs past a thousand a month.

What MadeKeeper costs

$19 a month. One plan. Every sales channel included, no order-line meter, no tier to climb when you add a market or a good month. The full-history migration from Craftybase — purchases, batches, and sales on their original dates — is free, previewed before it writes anything, and undoable in one click. And you can export everything back out any time, so you're never locked in.

That's the whole price story. What's left is whether $19 actually does the job, so let's be even-handed about it.

What Stocksmith does that MadeKeeper doesn't

This is where an honest comparison earns its keep. Stocksmith is a more powerful piece of software than MadeKeeper in several real ways, and if you need these, that's a genuine reason to pay more:

None of that is MadeKeeper losing. It's MadeKeeper being a different tool for a different maker. But you should know what the extra money buys, because for some people it buys something they need.

What MadeKeeper does that a cheap plan won't

Now the other side, just as straight. Where MadeKeeper earns its $19 is the money layer that most maker tools — cheap ones especially — simply don't have:

Compare that to the alternatives a switcher usually weighs. Inventora's entry plan is also $19 and has better live sync today, but it carries no finance layer at all — no tax packet, no per-event P&L. Square's booth software is free, but its inventory-and-cost add-ons now live in a $49/mo Plus plan, and it still can't tell you what a specific event earned you after the booth fee and the drive. Different tools, different holes. MadeKeeper's whole reason to exist is the costing-and-profit half.

The bill you're probably already paying

There's a bigger number hiding behind the single-tool comparison. Most multi-channel makers don't pay for one tool — they pay for a stack. A spreadsheet or inventory app, plus an Etsy analytics tool, plus an email service, plus a mileage tracker, plus a show tracker, plus a QR-code subscription. Priced on today's vendor pages, a typical stack runs somewhere around $60 to $95 a month across four to six subscriptions.

MadeKeeper won't do every one of those jobs — it doesn't send buyer emails yet, doesn't print shipping labels, doesn't run your storefront. Being honest, its $19 covers maybe $55 to $70 of that stack's actual work: the inventory, the real-COGS costing, the fee-and-profit math, the mileage and expenses, the event P&L, the tax packet. So the fair way to frame it isn't "$19 instead of $49." It's "$19 covering the money jobs you were paying $60-plus a month to cobble together" — with the parts it doesn't do yet named openly so there are no surprises.

Who should stay on Stocksmith

An honest value case has to include the people it isn't for. Stay with Stocksmith if you've grown past bench-and-booth: staff logging in, thousands of orders a month, a real need for multi-level BOMs, production scheduling, or Amazon and QuickBooks sync running today. The team built the new plans for exactly that maker, and at that scale they're worth the money. Switching down to save $30 a month would cost you far more in features you actually use. That's not the pitch — that's just true.

So, is $19 enough?

If you're a solo or small maker selling across a few channels, keeping books once a year, and mainly needing to know what things cost and what your fairs and shops actually pay you — then yes, and the multi-channel version of Stocksmith would run you $49 or more for a heavier tool aimed at a bigger business than yours. If you're scaling into that bigger business, no, and you should stay where the power is. The dollar-for-dollar answer depends on which maker you are, and now you can see both.

If pottery is your craft, the MadeKeeper page for potters shows how a kiln load, clay by the bag, and the loss at every firing stage cost out on the $19 plan.

Want to check the math on your own terms? MadeKeeper is built to be the honest Craftybase alternative for makers staying small — $19 a month, one plan, your whole history imported free, and the person who answers your email made the thing.