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Pottery & ceramics

Moving Your Pottery Business Off Craftybase

The real cost of a kiln load once loss and seconds are counted — and what actually moves over when a potter switches to a $19 tool built for one studio.

MadeKeeper · August 11, 2026

Two mugs go into the bisque fire with hairline cracks nobody caught at the greenware stage. A third comes out of the glaze fire fused to the kiln shelf — a run of cobalt pooled at the foot, and now it's not a second, it's a loss, plus fifteen minutes with a diamond pad getting the shelf clean again for next time. None of that shows up if the only number you're tracking is what sold this week. It shows up in the kiln load, where a batch of thirty greenware mugs is never a batch of thirty finished ones, and every mug that survives has to carry the cost of the ones that didn't.

Craftybase used to ask that question by default — clay by the bag, glaze by the ounce, a firing as its own line item. Then in July 2026 it became Stocksmith and repositioned around small-batch manufacturers: multi-stage production runs, bills of materials, a floor with staff on it. That's real software for a real kind of business. It's just not the studio with one wheel, one kiln, and a seconds shelf by the door. Here's what a kiln load actually costs once you count what survives it, and what switching off Craftybase looks like if you're still that studio.

Survivor math: what a kiln load actually costs

Start with a real load: thirty stoneware mugs, thrown and trimmed, loaded green.

Two mugs crack in the bisque fire. Twenty-eight go on to glaze.

One mug fuses to the shelf in the glaze fire — a total loss, not a second. Three more come out sellable but flawed: a pinhole, a bare foot ring, a glaze run that pools at the base. Good enough for the seconds table, not good enough for full price. That leaves 24 first-quality mugs and 3 seconds — 27 sellable, out of 30 thrown.

Total cost through both firings: $31.68 + $45.00 + $44.80 + $60.00 = $181.48. That cost doesn't know or care which mugs make it — it's spent the moment the kiln door closes. Spread across the 27 that actually reach a customer, true cost per mug is $181.48 ÷ 27 = $6.72, materials and firings only. That's the number that goes on the tax packet, and it only exists once you've done the survivor math — not the moment you glazed 28 mugs, and not the moment you loaded 30.

Why seconds don't lower the real cost — they just redistribute it

Every mug in that load cost the same $6.72 to make, seconds included — the flaw showed up after the cost was already spent, not before. What changes is what each one sells for. Say the 24 first-quality mugs go for $28 and the 3 seconds go for $16 at the seconds table:

That's $538.52 before labor and booth costs — real money, and proof the load was worth firing even with two cracks and a shelf-stuck loss. But notice what the blended number hides: average revenue per mug is $720 ÷ 27 = $26.67, which looks fine sitting alone. It's the first-quality mugs quietly covering the gap the seconds leave, and if a bad week drops survival to 20 out of 30 instead of 27, that same $181.48 has to spread across fewer pieces — true cost jumps to $9.07 a mug, and $28 stops being as comfortable a price as it looked in a good week. Seeing that move in real time, load by load, is the difference between noticing a rough month and just feeling like one.

Labor belongs in the price, not the cost. Say this load — throwing, trimming, glazing — ran about six hours across thirty mugs, or 12 minutes each. At $20 an hour, that's $4.00 a mug, amortized. Fully-loaded price basis: $6.72 + $4.00 = $10.72. That number should drive what you charge. The $6.72 figure is what belongs on Schedule C. Folding the two together is the most common way potters underprice — pricing off the tax number and forgetting six hours at the wheel and the wire tool was worth something too.

What moves over, what you rebuild

The migration runs the same way for every craft coming off Craftybase: purchase history becomes dated material lots, production runs become batches with their original costs frozen in, 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 fired a dozen loads last year or twelve dozen.

What doesn't come over is your glaze book — the oxide and frit ratios, the cone-6 versus cone-10 test tile results, the loading pattern you learned after the third shelf-stuck disaster. Stocksmith's export carries your transaction history, not the recipe logic behind a glazed piece, because that link was never in the export file to begin with. You'll re-enter each glaze by hand as a recipe of its raw materials. For most studios that's a shorter job than it sounds — a working glaze palette is usually four to eight combinations, not forty, and once your clay body and your most-used glaze are entered as materials, each new recipe goes faster than the last. Budget an evening, maybe two if you keep a wide palette.

MadeKeeper also keeps your glaze and firing records per batch — which glaze went on what, fired to what cone — written down in the app instead of taped to the kiln. That's not a food-safety certification and it doesn't make a claim about your glazes; it's the paper trail if a customer or a craft-fair jury ever asks which glaze went on which piece.

One gap worth naming plainly: MadeKeeper doesn't auto-adjust for a new clay body's shrink rate or a supplier's reformulated glaze the way a dedicated ceramics-lab tool might. You update a material's cost and its notes when your supplier changes something — the same way you'd notice a new clay bag throws differently before you notice the invoice changed. That's a manual step, and it's the honest tradeoff for a tool built to stay this size.

The 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 many product lines. MadeKeeper is $19 a month, with no seats to count and no order-line meter. When the trial ends the shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — the tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19. For a one-wheel, one-kiln studio, that's the difference between paying for a manufacturing floor you don't run and paying for the parts you actually use: clay and glaze with true cost per piece, a kiln load as a real batch, stage loss built into the price instead of guessed at, and a per-event answer to whether the Saturday market was worth loading the kiln-opening table for.

Where Stocksmith is still the right call

If you've got an assistant glazing alongside you, if you're running staged production across several kiln loads and several product lines at once with a schedule to manage, or if Stocksmith's QuickBooks and wholesale-order integrations are already load-bearing for your business, stay put. That's not a hedge — it's the honest answer for a studio that's genuinely grown past one person. The higher tiers exist specifically for that, and a shop supplying a regional gallery chain with paid staff on the wheel is a different business than the one this article is written for.

If it's still you loading the kiln, checking what survived the bisque, and setting up the seconds table before Saturday — 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 bag of clay through two firings to a sticker price without a spreadsheet open on the side. The MadeKeeper page built for potters walks through kiln loads, greenware-to-glaze survival, and seconds pricing in the vocabulary you already use in the studio.

See the honest pottery-specific comparison — 14 days free, then $19/mo, and the person answering your email is the one who built the importer you'd actually be using.