Craftybase Reviews & Product Details

Craftybase is designed for small handmade product companies. I make/sell handmade jewelry both online and offline. I don’t know how I would survive without Craftybase! This is not “bookkeeping” app in the standard sense, it’s much, much more. My favorite features are:

- Being able to enter my expenses in the same app that I use to track the manufacturing of my orders and, therefore, my material & inventory supply levels. No duplication of effort or additional apps needed (I don’t need Quickbooks!).

- The ability to create manufacturing “recipes” for my products (and components of my products). This means every product has a recipe of materials and labor (time) which is used to automatically generate the COGS for that product AND it automatically adjusts my material stock levels each time I make a product (reducing the materials by the quantity the recipe dictates).

- The ability to make components with recipes that I can then use in product recipes (e.g., make a standard necklace chain component of several parts that I then use in each necklace product recipe). This ability to nest components inside of product recipes is great.

- Being able to easily create reports of my COGS and other information needed for taxes or to run my business.

- Because of the above functionality, I use my Craftybase datat to set my retail and wholesale product prices.

- Being able to connect to my online sales channels so that both my products and orders are sync’d with Craftybase. I have two Shopify stores and one Amazon store currently sync’ing with Craftybase. This means each order I get on those channels are sync’d over to Craftybase. I can then have some products set to “auto-manufacture” for the orders (which will reduce my material levels per the product’s manufacturing recipe). I also have other products that are not auto-manufactured, so when I make the product to fill the order I can adjust materials as needed and then click the manufacture button.

- I can easily see what materials I have in stock and know when I need to re-order.

Honestly, I depend on Craftybase ... there are so many features I love I could go on forever. But above are the top features that make Craftybase such a useful and unique tool for people in the handmade product business. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If you are going to use Craftybase, it is best to start using it when you first start acquiring materials you need to track. Of course, most of us don’t realize we will need a solution like Craftybase until we learn that our spreadsheet (or other apps) is impossible to manage as we grow. At that point, when you start using Craftybase, it is painful to get all of your existing materials entered correctly. This is true of any app, of course, but how you set up Craftybase is critical - since any error in how you enter your material expenses and product recipes will ripple through everything and cause you to have incorrect data for setting prices, etc.

Craftybase is a relational database - so many people will find it takes a ramp-up time to understand how each thing is connected to everything else. It’s easy to make mistakes that have enormous consequences. I’d say the ramp-up time to learning Craftybase so you can be confident you don’t have any fatal errors is more significant than for other apps - but you get a HUGE benefit once you learn it. Even after using it for several years now, I still occasionally make critical mistakes and need Cratfybase support to help me figure out where I made a mistake.

Functionality-wise, some functionality is not implemented as I would expect - which I find frustrating. One big example is “locations” (which they use for what they call "consignment tracking.") I have product inventory at my workshop and multiple local stores. I initially used “locations” to track my products as I moved them between the stores. BUT there are a couple of problems with how this is implemented on Craftybase. First, the problem is that once you “transfer” a product to a location, it will ALWAYS show up in that location’s list of products, even after the quantity =0 at that location. That would be ok if you could filter or sort the lists to see products with inventory >0 at each location, but you cannot. I need to generate reports of where my product inventory is - but the report will list products that were previously at that location but now are not. You can export the report, but that isn't useful since there are no live URLs to the products in the csv export, so you can't take action easily using the csv. The second issue is that you cannot bulk move items from one location to the next. I will move sets of products between store #1 and store #2. I should be able to see the list of products at store #1, check the ones I moved to store #2, then do a bulk "move to store #2". But I cannot. I need to open every product and do multiple steps to move that product to the new location. This makes the entire exercise take wayyyyy too much time! Due to these two large issues, I had to stop using the "consignment tracking" functionality, which is a big bummer since it's now more problematic for me to track where my products are.

It’s also frustrating that I can’t export or operate on my data in all the ways I would like. Craftybase has many reports included (which is great), and you can export a lot of the data, but there are still slices of filtered data sets I’d like to export that I can’t or bulk operations I would like to perform that I cannot.

I strongly desire that Craftybase supported an API for other apps to connect with. I have other apps that require the data I keep in Craftybase. It would be perfect if there was an API the apps could use to get that critical data (i.e., COGS info). Since there isn’t, I need to either manually enter the data into the other apps or export sets of data I then massage to import it into the other tools. I know making an API available is a big deal for a company, but I think Craftybase has such critical data for our businesses that they need to prioritize adding API support so those of us with growing companies can connect Craftybase our other vital apps. I know that Craftybase would grow a LOT if they offered this API connectivity.

Finally... Pricing for the app (as of Oct 2021) is fair for the level of functionality that you get. Craftybase is not a simplistic app, so don't expect it to be free. I started out using the Pro plan at $19/mon and am currently on the Studio plan at $29/mon. I upgraded my plan because I needed the “component assembly” and “consignment (location) tracking” functionality that didn’t come with the first-level Pro plan. In the end, the “consignment tracking” didn’t work as I expected (my comment above about locations, which I consider a bug of the app), so I didn’t get that benefit from my Pro plan. But, the Pro plan also gave me 3 integrated sales channels vs 1 (and I use all 3), plus it gave me 2 user accounts, which I now need. The Studio monthly pricing still seems fair for what you get.

If you need “material lot and BIN tracking” or “automated assemblies” functionality, you will need to bump up to their most expensive Indie plan at $49/mon. Note those are yearly subscription prices; monthly plans are about 18% more. I don’t see that I would need those features of the Indie plan, BUT I can see that I will eventually need to integrate more sales channels, which will force me up to the Indie plan, which allows five channels. Paying $20 more per month to add two more sales channels is a steep price increase when I will never need the other added functionality. I would strongly prefer that Craftybase offer a plan where you could pay them $x per additional channel you integrate. That would be fair to those of us who will never need the added Indie plan functionality but will be growing and need more sales channels. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.