Craftybase ‑ Manufacturing ERP

I am so disappointed in crafty base because I have heard many great things about them. I was charged the studio fee. I was not given access to all the information I put in while on the trial nor anything else. Then I email over and over about this because they do not have live chat. I then was allowed in after some time passed. but wait for it... I was kicked out again and the only tab that was open was the cancel your subscription. This is the most frustrating thing ever. I put in so many hours of material for my business during the trial just to have to find another company. This is so unprofessional. I went a whole day and could not accomplish anything.

I began with Craftybase in January 2021. I wanted an updated and more efficient web-based system to track inventory and sales. I liked that it imported sales from Shopify every morning. Previously, I had to do that manually.

Once I got into using it, I started seeing several issues. As a soap and cosmetic maker, I follow GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices), so lot and batch tracking is imperative. In order to use lot tracking, I had to pay for the highest tier subscription only to learn that CB doesn't track quantities of each lot and doesn't use the "first in, first out" practice of using older materials first. When creating a batch of a product, I need to manually select the lot number I used. This wasn't worthy of the higher tier price. In addition to this, Craftybase's servers continually had issues with lagging and not syncing. Thinking I didn't commit changes, I would repeat the steps. Once the servers did catch up, I had to go back and undo all the repeat changes I made.

Over the 2.5 years, I continued to use Craftybase, I asked for features and fixes for GMP and other simple requests, but none were ever addressed. The final straw happened in July when I received an email announcing a price increase. I was currently paying $34.99/mo, but come September 1st, it would increase to $79.00/mo!! There were no improvements or new features except adding sales channels for other customers, and they more than doubled my monthly subscription fee.

I'm currently seeking out another system that works the way manufacturers work and looking forward to ending the relationship with Craftybase. I do NOT recommend this system.

This app has potential, but they haven't built out reliable infrastructure. The user interface has several "wonky" issues, like when using the reports, they don't have a drop down menu for "last week" "last year" "year to date" etc - just a cumbersome slider of calendars to use (if you want to look years ago, you need to slide through months and months and months). Another example is when you are entering raw materials used in a manufacture, the quantities will somehow automatically snap to a recent number used. This makes no sense - the whole idea is that I am recording the exact weight in a raw material. There are many more little bugs like this.

There are also unplanned outages way too often. It's very hard to pay this much when a wholesaler of mine needs a shipment and my manufacturing software is down without notice. (My bill tripled this year - will they price hike again, trapping businesses during their busiest time of year?)

The headaches maybe used to be worth the lower fees, but with the new pricing, do yourself a favor and look into other more reliable options. (Also - they let us know they are raising prices in order to be able to offer more functionality... in the future... and to the higher level plans. Why are current customers expected to pay for future functionality - and they've been promising functionality for years. It comes very slowly if at all for the affordable plans.) The customer service - and customer appreciation - is abysmal. I wish that weren't the case. Like I said, I want to like this app. But it's hard to stand behind a company who doesn't value its customers.

****Update: Due to this review, the founder emailed and gave me ZERO business days notice before deleting five years of my data. Luckily, I already migrated to a new system due to the above concerns, but I would hate a small business to be left without their data. (You will notice a similar pattern of vindictive behavior in the comments of poor reviews, making exaggerated claims about FB posts. I have posted concerns over loss of functionality on the FB page and they were quickly removed and no one from customer service reached out.)

Support is poor, app is broken as often as it’s functional. And they delete conversational / evaluation posts in their Facebook group (which was only asking customers for their input to help me evaluate)

Actions of developers has REALLY put me off

Update:
I tried my best to use this software - but it was broken as often as it was functional. I manually updated recipes and spent a lot of time trying to add my data. But then figured out that in order to support bundles being sold (who doesn’t bundle their products these days) I would have to go back and recreate everything as a “component”. After manually adding the first recipe, I started on the second and couldn’t copy. I wasn’t going to manually imput every recipe ingredient I have.

I emailed support for help.
After they didn’t respond within a few days I found their Facebook group and asked for help within it.

A couple other customers also started to give their (not so glowing) feedback on how it works, at which point they immediately deleted the post.

Their comment below is more BS - clearly they don’t know how to look after customers. Run!