Inventory management pricing
- Variance in units (negative is a shortfall)
- -86
- What the shortfall cost you to replace
- $1,075
- Count accuracy, percent of expected found
- 96.4
The arithmetic on these sheets is your own count: units, unit cost and reorder point in, variance and value out. Nothing is estimated and no industry average is applied to your numbers. Where a page states an outside figure it names the document it came from and links to it.
Inventory management pricing is rarely one number, and the shape of the pricing tells you more about whether a product fits you than the headline figure does. There are four common shapes in this market, each of which punishes a different kind of business, and the way to price a shortlist honestly is to work out which shape you are being charged under and then compute your own annual figure rather than comparing monthly headlines.
Open the Inventory spreadsheet template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Per user, per month
The commonest shape and the friendliest to a business with a lot of stock and few people. It becomes expensive the moment counting is something several people do, which is exactly the practice most operations are trying to build. Price it at the number of people who will genuinely need a login, then add the one you forgot.
Per location or per warehouse
Kind to a single site and brutal to a business with vans, a lockup and a second branch. Before comparing, decide whether a van is a location in your world. If it is, and under this shape it usually has to be, that decision can double the quoted price.
By volume: items, SKUs, orders or transactions
This one scales with the thing you are trying to grow, which is either fair or perverse depending on your margins. The trap is that the tier boundary is usually crossed by the tail of slow-moving lines rather than by real activity, so a business gets pushed up a tier by stock it barely touches.
Flat, with the ceiling in the small print
A single price with limits on records, history or exports. Read the limits, because the one that bites is almost never the item count; it is history retention, and losing last year's counts destroys the only thing that made the record worth keeping. Stocktaka is flat at $49/mo and says what the free tier keeps on its pricing page.
Stock counts: what people ask before the first one
How should I compare two quotes on different shapes? Convert both to an annual figure using your own numbers: your people, your locations, your line count, over three years rather than one. A per-user product that is cheaper this year is often not cheaper by the time counting has spread to three people, which is the outcome you are paying for.
Is the implementation cost real? Usually, and it is usually your time rather than an invoice. Entering an item master, agreeing a line definition and getting the first two counts done is the real cost of any of these products, and it is the same whichever pricing shape you sign.
What is a fair price for a small operation? Judge it against the shortfall your first count finds rather than against the market. If a count turns up a few thousand dollars of unexplained variance a year, the software question answers itself; if it turns up almost nothing, the honest answer may be that a sheet is enough.
Should I pay annually for the discount? Only after two counts on the product. The annual discount is real money and so is the risk of prepaying for a tool your team abandons in month three, and two counts is roughly when you know which one it is.
Will the Inventory management pricing fit what you count?
Tell us what you are counting and how you count it today, and we will tell you whether Stocktaka fits before you pay for anything.