The best Stocky alternatives for makers, honestly compared

Shopify is retiring Stocky on August 31, 2026, and if you make what you sell, you're now shopping for somewhere to move your inventory and cost records. This is an honest roundup of the real options — including the ones that aren't us — so you can pick the right shape of tool, not just the loudest one.

We'll be upfront: Batchnook is one of the options here, and it's built for a specific kind of maker. We'll tell you plainly who each choice fits and who should skip it. If a spreadsheet is right for you, we'll say so.

First, figure out which kind of business you are

Stocky covered two jobs that people often lump together, and the right replacement depends entirely on which one is yours.

• You resell finished stock. You buy products and sell them, and you mainly need counts synced across a point of sale and an online store. You're a retailer.
• You make products from raw materials. A candle is wax, fragrance, a jar, a wick, and a label — and its cost changes every time any of those prices move. You need true per-product cost, not just stock counts. You're a maker.

Most tools do one of these well and the other badly. Sort yourself first and the shortlist gets short fast.

The honest shortlist

1. Shopify's built-in inventory tools — for retailers

If you're a retailer, this is the path of least resistance. It's already in your admin, it syncs stock across POS and online, and there's nothing to migrate to. Shopify has said historical purchase orders can't be imported back in, so your Stocky cost history won't ride along automatically — but if what you needed Stocky for was stock levels, not costing recipes, Shopify's own tools are the natural home.

Pick this if: you resell finished goods and mostly need synced counts.
Skip this if: you make products from materials and need to know a recipe's real cost.

2. A spreadsheet — for the smallest and simplest

There is no shame in a spreadsheet, and for a maker with a handful of products it can be genuinely enough. Paid maker spreadsheet templates have sold for years precisely because they work at small scale. Your Stocky CSVs drop straight in.

Pick this if: you have a few products, don't mind manual updates, and want zero subscription.
Skip this if: your costs change often, you have more than a dozen materials, or updating it has become the chore you avoid — a static sheet can't recompute a margin when a supplier raises a price, and that's usually the moment makers outgrow it.

3. Dedicated maker costing tools — for people who make things

This is the category built for the maker job: materials with real units, recipes/BOMs, batch logging, and per-product cost that stays current as prices move. Several tools live here, and they differ in ways worth checking before you commit:

• Where it runs. Some are web-only, meaning you cost things at a desk. Others put receipt capture on your phone, so you snap a supplier receipt in the moment.
• How they price. Some hold a flat monthly price; others meter your transactions or sales, so the bill climbs in your busiest months. Read the pricing page for the word "per transaction."
• Whether you can leave. This one's easy to miss and expensive to learn late. Check whether export is free or paywalled before you put a year of data in.

That last point deserves its own line, because it's where these tools quietly diverge. One well-known maker tool paywalls CSV export entirely — every "Download CSV" opens an upgrade prompt, and export only unlocks on a paid plan (documented as recently as July 2026). Another gives data out free on every plan. Same category, opposite behavior. You're leaving Stocky partly because a platform decision was made for you; it's worth landing somewhere that won't do the same. (We keep honest side-by-sides of two of these — Ardent Seller and Craftybase / Stocksmith — if you want the specifics.)

Pick a maker costing tool if: you build products from raw materials and want margins that stay honest automatically.
Check before you commit: desktop-only vs. phone capture, flat price vs. transaction meter, and free export vs. paywalled export.

Where Batchnook fits — and where it doesn't

Since you're comparing, here's the straight version of us.

Batchnook is for makers who build products from raw materials and want true per-product cost without a data-entry weekend. Concretely:

• Receipt capture on your phone. Snap a supplier receipt; the AI reads the lines; you approve them before anything counts. Your material costs update, and every affected product's margin updates with them.
• Moving-average costing. Each material carries an average cost that re-averages on every purchase — so a product's cost reflects what you actually paid lately. The method is disclosed on every report, which is what makes the numbers accountant-ready.
• A migration built for exactly this moment. Bring your Stocky CSV in through a column mapper (paste it, or upload the file), see a dry-run preview before anything saves, and undo the whole import within 24 hours if it's not right. There's no one-click "Stocky preset" — it's an honest column-map, a few minutes per file. Your materials and their cost history come across; because Stocky is a retail tool with no maker recipes, you build each product's recipe once in Batchnook and the cost maintains itself after that. And if you'd rather not map it yourself, we'll do it for you — send your Stocky or Stocksmith export and we'll map it in, the first 50 files, through October 31, 2026 (scheduled and hands-on, not a live queue).
• An own-your-data promise, in writing. Export everything — materials, products, batches, orders, cost history — as JSON or CSV, free, on every tier, forever. The plan you join at is yours; existing customers are never repriced. We meter AI receipt scans (our real cost), never your sales.

And here's who should not pick us:

• Retailers who mainly need POS/online stock sync — Shopify's built-in tools fit you better.
• Makers whose hardest problem is cottage-food compliance or nutrition/allergen labels— that's a specialist's job and we deliberately don't build it. A compliance-focused maker tool will serve you better there, and nothing stops you running us alongside it for costing.
• Anyone happy on a spreadsheet. If a sheet is working and updating it doesn't hurt, keep it.

A simple way to decide

1. Do I make or resell? Resell → Shopify's tools. Make → keep reading.
2. How many products and how often do costs change? A few, rarely → a spreadsheet is fine. Many, or often → a costing tool earns its keep.
3. Can I get my data back out for free? If the answer on a given tool is "only on a paid plan," weigh that heavily. You're switching because a door closed on you once already.

FAQ

If you make products from raw materials and want your Stocky cost history to keep working for you — margins that stay honest as prices move, and your data yours to take with you — Batchnook is built for exactly that. The Stocky comparison page shows the move in detail, and if you haven't exported yet, start with how to export your data from Stocky.