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Moving Your Candle Business Off Craftybase

Craftybase is Stocksmith now, priced for production floors. Here's the honest math for a one-cure-rack candle business, wick by wick.

MadeKeeper · August 6, 2026

A soy candle doesn't finish the moment it sets. Pour a batch of 8-ounce tins tonight and the wax is solid by morning, but the fragrance oil is still migrating through it — binding to the wax molecules, settling into whatever hot throw the candle is actually going to have on someone's shelf. Sell it on day two and you might get a complaint that it "doesn't smell like anything." Wait the full one to two weeks candle makers call cure, and the same candle throws the way it's supposed to. That gap between poured and sellable is where a lot of candle costing quietly falls apart, and it's exactly the kind of thing a generic inventory tool doesn't know to ask about.

Craftybase knew to ask about it, for the fifteen years candle makers were a big part of who used it. Then in July 2026 it became Stocksmith and repositioned around small-batch manufacturers — production scheduling, bills of materials, multi-stage builds. That's a real business to build software for. It's also not a one-person candle operation with a melter, a pour station, and a cure shelf in the spare room. Here's the honest math on what changed, what a candle batch actually costs down to the cent, and what moving off Craftybase looks like if you're the maker it left behind.

What a batch actually costs, wick by wick

Start with a real batch: 6 pounds of soy wax at $6.25 a pound, fragranced at an 8% load — a common rate for a strong but not overpowering hot throw.

Fill 8-ounce tins at roughly 8.5 oz of net pour weight each (glass jars and tins rarely fill to a clean round number once you account for the wick base and a little headspace), and 103.68 oz of melted wax makes 12 candles, with about 1.7 oz left in the pot for topping off shrinkage — normal for soy, which sinks a little as it cools.

Total materials: $37.50 + $12.48 + $4.20 + $13.20 = $67.38, or $5.62 a candle across 12. That's your COGS number — the one that goes on the tax packet, materials only, no labor folded in.

But you don't sell all 12. Most candle makers pull one from every batch for a burn test before it goes anywhere near a booth — checking for mushrooming, sooting, a wick that's too small for the vessel. That candle is real cost and it never reaches a customer. Spread the same $67.38 across 11 sellable candles instead of 12, and materials cost is actually $6.13 a candle, not $5.62. The batch didn't get more expensive; you just found out what it actually costs once you count what's sellable, not just what's poured.

Now add labor, for pricing purposes only — melting, fragrancing, pouring, and labeling a batch like this runs about 45 minutes. At an owner rate of $20/hour, that's $15.00, amortized across the 11 sellable candles: $1.36 a candle. Fully-loaded cost per piece: $6.13 + $1.36 = $7.49. That number is what should drive what you charge — the $6.13 materials figure is what goes on Schedule C. Mixing the two is the single most common way candle makers underprice: pricing off COGS and forgetting the 45 minutes at the pour station was worth something too.

The cure shelf is a cash-flow problem, not just a quality one

That $67.38 in materials isn't just tied up in wax and tins — it's tied up for one to two weeks before it's legally and practically sellable, sitting on a cure shelf doing nothing but developing hot throw. Run two or three batches a week during a busy stretch before a fall market season, and you can have $150–$200 in materials cured or curing at any given moment that hasn't turned into a sale yet and won't for days. None of that shows up if the only thing you're tracking is what sold this week. It shows up the moment you can see cure-ready dates lined up against what's actually in the booth bin, which is the difference between guessing you'll have enough scent-matched inventory for Saturday and knowing it Tuesday night.

The honest dollar math

Stocksmith's entry tier — Studio — runs $49 a month per user. Climb the ladder and it's $99 for Indie, $199 for Business, $349 for Growth, each tier adding production-scheduling and integration features built for a shop running multiple staff through multiple SKUs. MadeKeeper is $19 a month, one plan, no seats to count and no tier to climb into. For a one-person candle business — melter, pour station, cure shelf, one or two market booths a month — that's the difference between paying for a manufacturing floor you don't have and paying for the parts you actually use: materials with true cost per candle, batches with labor amortized in for pricing, cure-date tracking, and a per-event answer to whether Saturday's booth fee was worth loading the truck for.

What moves over, what you rebuild

The migration runs the same way for every craft coming off Craftybase: your purchase history becomes dated material lots, your production runs become batches with their original costs frozen in place, your orders become sales on the dates they actually happened. It's previewed before anything writes to your account, and one click undoes the whole thing if the preview looks wrong. That's free, whether you poured forty batches last year or four hundred.

What doesn't come over is your recipes — the wax-to-fragrance ratio, the wick size per vessel diameter, the pour temperature you settled on after three burnt batches. Stocksmith's export doesn't carry the bill of materials behind a batch, because that link was never in the export file to begin with. You'll re-enter each recipe by hand. For most candle lines that's a shorter job than it sounds — a working scent-and-vessel matrix is usually somewhere between six and a dozen combinations, not fifty, and once your base wax and a couple of core fragrances are entered as materials, the fifth recipe goes faster than the first. Budget an evening.

One gap worth naming plainly: MadeKeeper doesn't run a live commodity feed for wax the way some tools track metals or produce pricing. You update a material's cost when your supplier's invoice changes — the same way you'd notice paraffin or coconut wax got more expensive this quarter. That's a manual step, not an automated one, and it's the honest tradeoff for a tool built to stay this size.

Where Stocksmith is still the right call

If you've got staff working the pour station alongside you, if you're running production schedules with staged batches across several SKUs at once, or if Stocksmith's QuickBooks and Amazon integrations are already load-bearing for your business, stay put. That's not a hedge — it's the honest answer for a candle maker who's genuinely outgrown a one-person operation, and the higher tiers exist specifically for that. A wholesale account supplying a regional gift-shop chain with a part-time employee running the melter is a different business than the one this article is written for.

If it's still you doing the pour, watching the cure shelf, and doing the burn test before Saturday's booth — the math above is the real pitch. $19 instead of $49 climbing toward $349, your batch and lot history moved over free and undoable, and a cost chain that runs from a pound of wax to a sticker price without a midnight spreadsheet in between. If candles are specifically your craft, the MadeKeeper page built for candle makers walks through fragrance load, cure gates, and burn testing in the vocabulary you already use on the label.

See the honest candle-specific comparison — free during the founding pilot, one plan, and the person answering your email is the one who built the importer you'd actually be using.