Shopify's built-in inventory tools are fine — until they're not. The moment you need purchase orders, cost of goods sold, bill of materials tracking, or even just a reliable profit margin calculation, you're looking at third-party apps. And the pricing? $99 to $199 a month, depending on which one you pick.
The best one has been around for years. Merchants love it. And it's shutting down in August 2026.
That was our signal to build something better. Not as a business opportunity (though it could be), but because we were managing inventory ourselves and kept hitting the same wall. We decided to build what we actually needed, make it solid, and put it out there at an honest price.
The Problem Everyone Faces
Shopify handles basic stock levels: you have 50 units, someone buys 5, you have 45. Great. But that's where it stops.
Real inventory is messier. You need to know:
- How much profit are you actually making on each product?
- What's your cost of goods when you order in bulk?
- When do you need to reorder before you run out?
- Which products are slow movers that are tying up cash?
- How much waste or shrinkage are you accounting for?
- For made-to-order products, what raw materials do you need?
Shopify doesn't touch any of this. So merchants cobble together spreadsheets or buy third-party apps. Most of those apps either have sync issues (they get out of step with Shopify), are expensive as hell, or both.
We kept hearing the same complaint: "I spend an hour manually updating inventory spreadsheets every week because the app sync is unreliable." That's a $30,000 a year person-hour problem. If an app costs $2,000 a year and you still need an hour a week, it's not actually solving the problem.
So We Built Stocky
Here's what the app does:
Purchase Orders
Full PO lifecycle: create, approve, receive, and match against supplier invoices. The app tracks what you ordered, what arrived, and what you've been charged.
Bill of Materials
For makers and assembled products: define what raw materials go into each finished product, with waste factors and batch quantity tracking. One click to generate a raw materials shopping list based on pending orders.
COGS Calculation
Real cost of goods sold — not just the product cost but weighted average costs across batches, factoring in waste and package size.
14 Different Reports
ABC analysis (which products are making you money?), profit margins by SKU, forecasting based on sales velocity, stock turnover rates, slow-mover analysis, supplier performance. You can export them as CSV and build your own dashboards.
Auto-Deduction on Orders
This is the feature competitors charge an extra $99/month for. When a customer buys something, the inventory deducts automatically via webhook. Real-time, no sync delays, no manual intervention.
That's it. No blockchain. No AI. Just straightforward inventory management that actually works.
Why 1,791 Tests Matter
Here's the thing about inventory data: if it's wrong, it's catastrophically wrong. If the app tells you that you have 100 units and you actually have 10, you've just promised products you don't have to 90 customers. Or you oversell, you can't fulfill, customers get angry, you refund them at a loss.
We could have shipped a basic version quickly and iterated based on user feedback. But with inventory, you don't get second chances. So we did the boring thing: we wrote tests.
1,791 of them.
- Unit tests: Each function is tested in isolation. Does COGS calculation handle bulk pricing correctly? Does waste factor calculation work with different unit types?
- Integration tests: Multiple parts of the system talking to each other. If I create a PO, mark it received, and then adjust the cost per unit, does COGS recalculate everywhere it should?
- Contract tests: We actually set up a test Shopify store and run the app against it. The webhook that auto-deducts inventory? We test it against the actual Shopify API, not a mock.
- Data integrity tests: Simulating edge cases — concurrent orders, partial receives, price adjustments after the fact. Does the inventory ever get corrupted?
Running the test suite takes about 2 minutes. We run it before every deploy. We catch bugs that would have shipped in version 1.0 of a faster development approach.
One specific test caught a bug where concurrent webhooks could double-deduct inventory if they arrived out of order. That's the kind of subtle, catastrophic bug that only shows up once customers are live with real data. We found it in testing.
The Pricing Philosophy
We priced the app at $39/month. That's about a fifth of what competitors charge. Here's why we did that.
The feature that competitors charge $99+ extra for is auto-deduction. It uses one webhook handler, stores a few JSON records, and runs maybe 50 milliseconds of logic per order. The actual infrastructure cost to serve that feature is negligible. We're talking cents.
So why would we charge 5,000x the cost-to-serve?
Some would say "because we can." Customers need it, competitors charge it, so we could pocket the difference. But that's rent-seeking. It's charging more than the value because you can, not because you should.
We priced at what it actually costs us to deliver well, maintain it, handle support, and keep the lights on. That turned out to be $39.
Honest pricing attracts a different customer. Instead of optimising for enterprise deals and aggressive contract negotiation, you attract merchants who value straightforward pricing and reliability. Those tend to be nicer customers.
Building Products Teaches You Everything
We didn't build Stocky to make money. We built it to solve our own problem. But the process — scoping features, writing tests, handling edge cases, pricing honestly, getting customer feedback — is exactly what we bring to client work.
The skills transfer perfectly. Whether we're building a chatbot, an automation pipeline, or an inventory app, the approach is the same: understand the problem, build what works, test the hell out of it, ship something honest.
Most product companies skip the testing part. Most consulting firms skip the building part. We do both. That gives us perspective that neither approach alone has.
What's Next
Stocky is live and merchants are using it. We could've spent years building features nobody wants. Instead, we shipped with the core (which is genuinely useful) and let customers tell us what's missing.
The next features will come from actual customer requests, not guesses. And we'll test them just as thoroughly as the core.
If you're building products, the lesson is: ship something you'd actually use yourself. If you're managing inventory and the thought of another $199/month tool makes you cringe, Stocky exists for you. And if you're running a business with repetitive operational problems, that's exactly where AI and custom software can make a real dent.