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Moving Your Soap Business Off Craftybase

Craftybase is Stocksmith now, climbing a pricing ladder built for bigger shops. Here's the honest math for a one-cure-rack soap business, bar by bar.

MadeKeeper · August 3, 2026

Soap and candle makers were Craftybase's biggest crowd, long before the rebrand — anyone who's spent time in the soap corners of the internet has run into someone doing the batch math in a spreadsheet at midnight before a market, or paying for the tool that promised to do it for them. So the July rebrand landed harder here than almost anywhere else. If you've got a cure rack with six weeks of unsellable bars sitting on it right now, cash tied up in soap you can't ring up yet, here's the honest version of what changed, what a real batch costs you to the penny, and what actually happens if you move.

The rebrand, plainly

Craftybase became Stocksmith on July 1, 2026. Same login, same historical data, new name — and a new pricing ladder aimed higher up the market. Their entry plan, Pro, covers one sales channel. The moment you're selling at fairs and on Etsy and maybe into a shop or two on consignment — which describes a lot of soap makers past their first year — you're not on Pro anymore. You're on Studio, at $49 a month, with Indie at $99 and Business at $199 above that if your order volume climbs. None of this is a bait-and-switch. Stocksmith is building for bigger operations now — multi-user seats, production scheduling, the works — and that's a legitimate business to be in. It's just a different business than the one that started with one bench and a loaf mold.

MadeKeeper is $19 a month, one plan, every channel included, nothing metered by order count. That's the price case. The more useful question is whether it actually fits how a soap business runs, not just whether it's cheaper.

The one thing they already do well

Credit where it's due: Stocksmith's lot tracking is real and it's good. Material lot numbers carry through to the batches that use them and on to the orders those batches shipped on — full forward-and-backward traceability, the kind that matters if you ever need to answer "which bars had that fragrance oil lot" fast. For a craft where a bad batch of lye or a contaminated fragrance oil is a real recall scenario, that's not a nice-to-have.

MadeKeeper does the same thing, lot to batch to sale, because it's the same problem every soap maker has whether they've ever thought about a recall or not. The difference isn't the feature. It's that you're not paying $49-and-climbing to get it — it's on the one $19 plan, same as everything else. Neither of us will tell you your labels are compliant or your records satisfy MoCRA — that's not a claim software gets to make on your behalf. What MadeKeeper does is hold the batch records the paperwork side of soap actually asks about: lot, date, what went into the pour, in one place instead of a binder or a spreadsheet tab you forget exists.

One batch, cut into ten bars, to the penny

Here's a real cold-process batch, priced the way you'd enter it as a recipe — not a rule of thumb, the actual numbers.

Oils, 32 ounces total (a standard single-loaf batch):

Lye and additions:

Batch material total: $6.17. Cut the loaf into ten bars once it's firm enough to slice, and materials run $0.62 a bar. Add kraft wrap and a printed label, $0.13 more, and your true materials cost — the number that lands on your tax packet, nothing else in it — is $0.75 a bar.

Now the labor, which MadeKeeper keeps separate on purpose. Thirty-five minutes to weigh, mix, and pour, another twenty later to unmold, cut, and wrap — fifty-five minutes total, amortized across the batch. At a $24/hour shop rate, that's $22.00 for the batch, or $2.20 a bar. That number feeds the suggested-price coach so you can see it in daylight instead of guessing at 11pm the night before a show. It never touches your COGS and it never touches your Schedule C — your own time prices the bar, it doesn't reduce what you owe.

Fully loaded — materials plus labor — each bar costs $2.95 to make. At the coach's default markup, that suggests a retail price around $6.50 and a wholesale number closer to $4.75. Whether you actually charge that is your call; the point is you're looking at a real number instead of "what feels right," which is the whole reason pricing guilt exists in the first place — you already know your soap is worth something, you just haven't had the number in front of you.

And the six weeks those ten bars sit on the rack before they're sellable? That's not a footnote — cure dates are part of the heads-up engine, so a batch made today shows up as ready-to-sell on the date it actually clears cure, not the date you made it and forgot about.

It's also money, sitting there. If you keep three loaves rotating on the rack at once — a reasonable pace if you're making soap most weekends — that's roughly $18.50 in materials tied up and unsellable at any given moment, before you've counted the shelf, the cure room's humidity control, or your own time. None of that shows up if all you're tracking is "what sold this week." It shows up the moment you can see cure dates lined up against what's actually in stock, which is the difference between guessing you have enough bars ready for Saturday's market and knowing it Tuesday night.

What moves over, what you rebuild

The migration is the same offer for every craft that comes off Craftybase, and it's worth taking seriously rather than assuming the worst: 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 something looks off. That's free, and it's the same import whether you made twelve batches last year or four hundred.

What doesn't come over is your recipes — the oil percentages, the lye ratios, the fragrance load per pound. Stocksmith's own 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 rebuild each recipe by hand on the other side. For most soap makers that's a shorter job than it sounds: your core line is usually five or six formulas, not fifty, and once you've entered your base oils as materials the second and third recipe go faster than the first. Budget an evening, not a weekend.

One more gap worth naming plainly: MadeKeeper doesn't do a live spot-price feed for anything, including oils that track commodity pricing. You update a material's cost when your supplier's invoice changes, the same way you'd notice your fragrance oil got more expensive — a manual step, not an automated one.

Where Stocksmith is still the right call

If you've got people other than you working the soap room, if you're running production schedules with sub-batches and staged pours, 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 soap maker who's genuinely outgrown a one-person operation. The higher tiers exist for exactly that, and they're built for it. A wholesale account with a regional grocery chain and a part-time employee cutting bars is a different business than the one this article is written for, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

If it's still you doing the pours, cutting the loaf, watching the cure rack, and wondering whether that market booth fee actually paid for itself — the math above is the real pitch. $19 instead of $49 and climbing, your batch and lot history moved over free and undoable, and a cost chain that runs from ounces of olive oil to a sticker price without you doing it by hand at midnight. If soap's specifically your craft, the MadeKeeper page built for soap makers walks through cure gates, superfat, and trace in the vocabulary you already use on the label.

See the honest soap-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.