Inventory Planner Alternatives for Shopify (2026): What It Actually Costs and What to Ask Before You Sign

Stocky stops working on August 31, 2026. If you used it for purchase orders and reorder recommendations, Shopify's built-in inventory management covers the stock tracking part — not the forecasting part. So most Stocky merchants end up looking at paid apps, and Inventory Planner by Sage is usually the first name on the list.

It is a serious product. It has been on the Shopify App Store since January 2013 and holds a 4.5 rating across 147 reviews. This post is not an argument that it's bad. It's an argument that you should know two things before you install it: what it costs, and what happens when a sync goes wrong.

Problem one: the price is not published

Here is the entire pricing section of the Inventory Planner listing on the Shopify App Store, quoted in full:

Free to install. Pricing adapts to your business needs. Contact us to get a quote.

External charges may be billed by Inventory Planner by Sage separately from your Shopify invoice.

That's it. No tiers, no rate card, no per-SKU number. You book a call to find out what you'll pay.

Third-party sites have tried to reconstruct the pricing, and they don't agree with each other — figures floating around include a Shopify-only "Essentials" plan near $120/month and floor pricing above $240/month, with add-ons reported for extra warehouses and SKU volume. Treat all of those as unverified. Sage doesn't confirm them, and we haven't seen a rate card either. The only number we can point at with a source is a merchant's own words.

One of them, a US retailer using the app for over four years, wrote this in an App Store review dated October 20, 2025:

"Something broke with the connection at the end of September 2025 and it has basically rendered IP useless to us. The data is not syncing and we are not able to use it even though we JUST paid for an entire year ($4k)."

Two things in that sentence matter, and they're not the same thing.

Problem two: annual prepay and a broken sync are a bad combination

The $4,000 is the headline, but the structure is what stings. Pay for a year up front, hit a sync failure in month two, and your leverage is gone. You're not a customer deciding whether to renew next month. You're a creditor waiting on a refund.

Inventory Planner's App Store rating breaks down like this: 86% five-star, 8% one-star. That barbell is worth reading carefully. When the sync works and onboarding goes well, merchants love it — the five-star reviews are specific and credible, praising forecasting accuracy and named support staff. When it breaks, the one-star reviews are about money already spent and support tickets going nowhere.

You are not choosing between "good app" and "bad app." You're choosing how much you'd like to be exposed if you land in the 8%.

The five questions to ask any inventory app before August 31

Ask these of Inventory Planner. Ask them of us. Ask them of anyone.

1. What is the price, in writing, before a sales call? If a vendor won't publish a number, there's a reason. Usually the reason is that the number depends on what they think you can pay.

2. Am I locked into an annual contract? Monthly billing means the vendor has to earn the next month. Annual prepay means they already have your money. For a tool you're adopting under deadline pressure, on a product you've never run in production, monthly is the safer shape.

3. When the app and Shopify disagree about a stock number, who wins — and do I get told? This is the question almost nobody asks and everybody should. An inventory app that silently overwrites Shopify's quantity can undo a manual count, a POS sale, or another app's adjustment, and you'll find out weeks later from an oversell. Ask specifically: does the app write conditionally (verify the value it expects, then write), or does it just write? Is every write logged with a before-value, an after-value, and who triggered it? Can you undo one?

4. Can I export everything, at any time, without asking support? Stocky merchants just learned this lesson the expensive way: some Stocky data — supplier records among it — doesn't come out through the built-in exports at all. Your purchase order history, supplier list, and cost data should be one button away, always.

5. What happens to my data if you get acquired? Inventory Planner was independent for about a decade, then got absorbed up a chain — Brightpearl acquired it in 2021, Sage acquired Brightpearl in 2022, and the product now trades as "Inventory Planner by Sage." Several long-time merchants report their pricing changed materially afterward. That's not a scandal — it's what acquisitions do. It's a risk to price in.

When Inventory Planner is the right call

Be fair about this. If you're doing eight figures, running multiple warehouses, selling on Amazon and Shopify, and you need real multi-channel demand planning with SKU-level profitability, Inventory Planner does things a small tool doesn't. The forecasting is deep. The onboarding is real and human. Its 86% five-star share isn't fake.

If that's you, the annual commitment is probably fine, because the app is load-bearing infrastructure and you have the ops team to run it.

When it isn't

If you're a small or mid-size Shopify store that used Stocky for purchase orders and a reorder nudge, you're being asked to buy an enterprise planning platform to replace a free app. That's the gap the Stocky shutdown opened, and it's a gap in pricing before it's a gap in features.

For that store, the correct shopping list is short: purchase orders, forecasting good enough to time a reorder, an import path out of Stocky, a published price, and a sync engine that doesn't quietly overwrite your stock.

Disclosure

We're building an app in this category. It's called StockBridge, and as of this writing it is not yet live on the Shopify App Store — so we're not going to put it in a comparison table against a product that has shipped for thirteen years. That would be marketing, not information.

What we'll commit to in public, before we have a single customer, is the answer sheet to our own five questions: a published monthly price with no annual contract, conditional writes so a stock number is never overwritten without verifying the value we expected to find, a full audit trail with rollback, one-click export of everything you put in, and a Stocky importer.

If those are the properties you want, join the waitlist and we'll email you when it's live. If Inventory Planner is the right fit for your size, go buy it — just ask for the price in writing first.

Sources

Inventory Planner by Sage — Shopify App Store listing (pricing text, rating distribution, launch date, and the October 20, 2025 review quoted above; all verified July 10, 2026)
Shopify Help Center — Migrating from Stocky to Shopify inventory management
Acquisition chain: Brightpearl acquires Inventory Planner (2021) · Sage targets retail with Brightpearl acquisition (Dec 2021, closed 2022)