Craftybase alternative for 3D printing

Craftybase is the tool a lot of Etsy sellers meet first when the spreadsheet stops coping. It was built for makers in general, candles and soap as much as plastic, and it now has a page aimed at 3D printing. This is what it does for a print shop, what it costs, and where a tool built only for printing does the job differently.

Craftybase is now Stocksmith

The pricing page calls it the same team and the same software under a new name. Every plan has a free trial, and there are three plans: Indie, Business and Growth.Stocksmith pricing

The trial lasts 14 days, and at the end of it you enter a payment method to continue.Stocksmith pricing

What it does for a print shop

Its 3D-printing page lists filament tracked by type, colour and weight remaining, with the filament deducted by the gram as you record production, and a cost per print that includes filament, electricity and labour. Packaging and post-processing time can be added, and multi-part prints get nested bills of materials.Craftybase

On the sales side, orders from Etsy and Shopify import daily, and at year end it produces the cost-of-goods figures for a US Schedule C from the records kept through the year.Craftybase

Where Craftybase is the better choice

• You sell more than prints. A shop that also pours resin, sews or casts wants one inventory for all of it, and Craftybase is built for exactly that.
• You want orders imported from your stores rather than entered. Printyard has no store integration; an order is something you create.
• Your accountant wants cost-of-goods reports ready for tax season. That is the job Craftybase states up front, and Printyard does not produce a tax report or an export.
• You work at a desk on a laptop. Its interface is built for that.

Where a print shop outgrows the recipe

Craftybase costs a print as a recipe: so many grams of filament, so much electricity, so many minutes of labour, typed in as lines. The page does not mention a machine-hour rate for printer wear, purge waste as its own line, or a failure rate.Craftybase

Those are the terms that move most on a printer. A twenty-hour print in a heated chamber burns machine life and power that a gram count never sees. A multi-colour plate throws plastic away as purge, which a recipe has no line for. And a print that fails at hour nineteen still used the plastic and the hours, which only a reserve across every quote pays back.

What Printyard does instead

A quote in Printyard is one unit of a job with every cost on its own line: filament at the roll’s own price per gram, purge at the same price, electricity at the printer’s draw and your tariff, machine wear as purchase price over expected life plus the year’s upkeep over hours run, your hands at your rate, parts, packaging, and a failure reserve on the material, power and wear but deliberately not on labour, since a failed print was never sanded. The marketplace’s cut is taken off the whole order, shipping included.

You can run the same arithmetic in the browser with the 3D print cost calculator, or see what an hour costs on a given machine in the electricity cost calculator.

In the app, logging a print takes its grams off the roll it ran on, orders are built from saved quotes, and the month shows gross and net side by side with fees, filament, failed prints, power and wear, and your time as the lines between them. It runs on an iPhone at the machine with no signal and in a browser at the desk, on one account.

Where Printyard falls short

• No Etsy or Shopify sync. Orders are entered, not imported.
• No export and no tax report. The month is a screen, not a file for your accountant.
• Stock is counted for filament and resin. Parts and packaging are priced on a job, not counted on a shelf.
• No slicer integration. Grams and hours are typed or copied from the slicer.

What it costs

There is no free tier. On the web it is $9.99 a month, $69.99 a year, or $149.99 once for good, shown in US dollars before checkout converts them. The iPhone app sells monthly and yearly plans with a free trial.Printyard pricing

Which to pick

If printing is one craft among several, or store sync and tax-ready reports are the reason you are shopping, Craftybase does more of that. If printing is the business and the question is what each job costs on each machine, Printyard is built around that, at a fraction of the monthly price. For how the numbers fit together, read how to price 3D prints.