What are you actually paying for inventory forecasting after Stocky? ($19 to $199 spread)

Shopify Discussion
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1

Stocky shut down two days ago and I’ve spent the last week going through what replaced it. The price spread surprised me enough that I thought it was worth writing down, because the “best apps” lists never put the numbers next to each other.

Checked on the App Store on 2 September 2026:

Inventory Planner (Sage) — 4.4★, 130 reviews. Free to install, then quote-based. You talk to sales.
Prediko — 4.9★, 234 reviews. $49 and $119/month. Best review record in the category by a wide margin.
Cogsy — 4.9★, 12 reviews. $199/month.
The self-serve tier — free to about $49/month. Several apps launched into this space in mid-2026, most with zero reviews yet.
So the same job — tell me what to reorder and when — is priced anywhere from free to $199/month, and at the top end you’re quoted rather than told.

What I couldn’t work out is whether the $199 tier is doing something genuinely different or just selling to bigger companies. Everything above about $50 adds seasonality, multi-location and purchase order workflows, but so do some of the cheaper ones on paper.

Two things I’d genuinely like to hear from people who’ve already switched:

What are you paying, and did you feel the jump was worth it? Particularly if you went from a cheap tool to an expensive one.
Did anyone go back to spreadsheets? For a small catalogue the arithmetic isn’t complicated, and I suspect some stores are paying for a dashboard they’d get more from in a sheet.
One thing worth flagging regardless of what you pick: Shopify states that suppliers can’t be exported from Stocky. Completed purchase order reports do export and carry supplier names, so build a SKU/supplier/lead-time sheet from those. You keep read-only export access for at least 90 days past 31 August — after that it’s gone.

(Disclosure: I build one of the apps in the cheap tier, so I’m not neutral. Full write-up with the tier breakdown here if useful: Best Shopify Inventory Forecasting Apps (2026))

2

Disclosure: I build one of the apps in the cheap tier, so I am not neutral either. Ours is free to 50 products and $3.99/mo above that, since that is what you asked.

On what the $199 buys. Having read the same listings, I do not think it is better arithmetic. The reorder-point maths is the same maths and it is not hard. What the top of the market sells is everything around it: several warehouses and 3PLs reconciling against each other, purchase orders that need approving by someone other than the person raising them, demand arriving from channels that are not Shopify, cash-flow planning attached to the buying decision, and a person to call when it is wrong. If none of those describe you, you are paying for the org chart rather than the forecast.

The one place price does buy accuracy is history, and even then only indirectly. A tool that has been recording your sales for two years can see last season; one you installed on Tuesday cannot, whatever it cost. That is a function of when you started, not of the tier.

On going back to spreadsheets. A sheet does the arithmetic perfectly well, and for a small catalogue I would not argue with anyone who does it. But there is one thing it cannot do, and it is not the maths - it is the daily record.

Velocity should be units sold divided by the days the variant was actually available, not by the days in the window. A SKU that sat at zero for 12 of 30 days did not sell slowly. Shopify will not hand you that after the fact: InventoryLevel is current state only - available, on hand, incoming, committed - with no series to query. So it has to be written down as it happens, daily, from whenever you start.

That is the part a sheet loses. Not because a sheet cannot hold it, but because nobody opens a spreadsheet at 3am to record that something went out of stock. Six months from now that column is the one thing you cannot reconstruct at any price.

On your last point - building a SKU/supplier/lead-time sheet from the completed PO reports is the right advice, and I would add one thing to it: keep that sheet as the thing you own, and pick a tool that reads it rather than one that makes you type it in again. Ours imports exactly that shape and exports it back in the same columns. Worth asking the others on your list whether theirs does.

Where we do not compete: no Stocky import beyond that sheet, no cash-flow planning, nothing outside Shopify, and no reviews yet - which at our end of the table deserves exactly as much scepticism as it sounds like it does.

3

One pricing comparison I would add: compare the cheapest plan that completes your actual workflow, not the entry price.

Checked today (3 September) on the official listings:

  • Stockie starts at $4.99/month for alerts, but creating/receiving purchase orders is listed in its $59.99 Pro Plus plan. Those are different jobs.
  • PML Stock Take lists stocktakes, purchase orders and transfers for one location at $10.79/month. That is not evidence that its forecasting matches a specialist forecasting product.

Shopify’s current migration guide also describes native purchase orders, supplier records and Sidekick-assisted reordering. I would test that baseline before paying just to recreate POs. Historical Stocky PO import is a separate limitation; creating a fresh PO from CSV line items does not preserve an old PO’s receiving history.

For a trial comparison, use the same small historical replenishment case and compare the suggested quantity, stock already on order, partial receipts and exportable records. Keep it in a demo/preview until you understand which actions write stock. A feature checkbox does not establish that this whole workflow works for your store.

Disclosure: I develop CatalogDelta, a catalog QA app, not a forecasting app. This is an AI-assisted feature/pricing check, not a claim that I have paid for or migrated with these products.

5

I think the interesting comparison here is less about the monthly price and more about what part of the purchasing workflow each app actually automates.

A few worth looking at are Supremo, EasyEcom Inventory Management, Stockful, and Thrive Inventory Management. They take different approaches to inventory, forecasting, purchasing, and multi-location management.

For a Shopify-only merchant, I’d look at four things:

• How good/transparent is the demand forecast?
• How are reorder points and quantities calculated?
• Does the app just alert you, or does it actually help execute the purchase?
• What do you get at the price you’re paying?

For example, Supremo calculates reorder points per SKU using demand and lead time, then automatically creates a PO when the reorder point is reached. You review it and send it to the supplier.

I’d personally ignore the headline “$19 vs $199” and map the actual workflow you need first. A lower-priced app that removes repetitive purchasing work can be a much better deal than paying more for forecasting capabilities you don’t use.

7

Developer of Replenly here figured I should be transparent about that. To answer the pricing question directly: Replenly is $19/month (Growth) or $39/month (Pro). Free plan available for under 100 SKUs.

It’s not trying to be a forecasting powerhouse it uses your actual sales velocity, lead times, and safety stock to surface what needs reordering and when, then generates POs. Stocky CSV import is built in so the migration is quick.

For context on what it doesn’t do: no demand forecasting models, no seasonality predictions. If that’s what you need, you’re probably looking at the $99+ tier apps. If you just need “what do I reorder today and how much,” that’s where Replenly sits.

8

Correction to my post above. I said our price above the free tier is $3.99/mo. It is $4.99. I took the figure from an old internal doc instead of checking it against our own listing, which is exactly the mistake I should not be making in a thread about comparing prices.

For completeness, since I got it wrong the first time: free to 50 products, then $4.99, and the ladder runs up to $49.99 for the tier that includes purchase orders and barcode stocktakes.

Flagging it here rather than leaving a wrong number sitting in a pricing comparison.

9

Full disclosure: I built a free tool in this space, link at the end. I’ll answer the pricing question first because I actually measured it.

The honest answer to “is the $199 tier doing something different”: partly, and the part that matters is narrower than the pricing suggests.

I benchmarked a proper statistical reorder policy against the two rules most people actually use — 30 days of cover on a trailing average, and a plain 4-week moving average. 160 SKUs, two years of data, censored history (stockouts hide demand, same as real life), same demand and lead-time paths for every policy.

What I found:

  • On your fast, regular sellers, a 30-day cover rule is nearly as good as anything expensive. 99.2% vs 98.1% fill rate in my test, and the simple rule used less stock.
  • On slow and irregular SKUs the gap is real: 87.0% vs 94.5% fill rate for occasional sellers, 73.3% vs 85.2% for rare ones.

So the value of sophisticated forecasting is concentrated almost entirely in the long tail. If most of your revenue comes from twenty SKUs that sell every day, you are unlikely to feel the difference between $25 and $199. If you carry hundreds of slow movers and your cash is stuck in dead stock, that is where the expensive tools earn their money.

One thing worth checking regardless of what you buy: if a SKU was out of stock, those days are recorded in your history as zero demand. Every tool you feed that data to will under-forecast that product, order less, and stock out again. In my tests a store filling 37.6% of demand was under-estimating it by 60%. Dividing by days available instead of days elapsed removes most of that, and it costs nothing.

I built a free browser tool that does this on a Shopify order export — days of stock left per SKU, reorder points, and a walk-forward test of whether the forecast actually beats a trailing average on your own data. No account, nothing uploaded, the CSV is parsed in your browser: https://stock-runway.netlify.app

The full benchmark, including the cases where the statistical approach loses and one result I still cannot explain, is on the same site.

10

One line item no pricing page shows: who measures your lead time.

Every app on that list computes a reorder point. Every one of them multiplies by a lead time. So the real question is where that number comes from, and most of them ask you to type it in, which means it is the supplier’s quote, and suppliers quote their best week, not their usual one. The alternative is a tool that times its own receipts, order date to arrival date, and takes the median across the last handful of deliveries.

That gap is worth more than the distance between $19 and $199.

Fourteen quoted days against a real median of twenty-two is eight days of stock you never ordered, on every SKU from that supplier, every single cycle. It does not show up as a line on any invoice. It shows up as an empty shelf in the third week of the month and a customer who bought it somewhere else.

So ask each vendor one plain question: does the app record the date a delivery actually landed? Some will say yes and mean the date you typed.

Disclosure: I build Binly (Binly ‑ Stocktake & Reorder - Stocky replacement: phone stocktakes, POs & smart reorder | Shopify App Store), which takes that median from a shop’s own receipts, so obviously this is the question I would raise.