Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Craftybase. Craftybase is a trademark of its owner, named here only to describe what this tool is and is not.
These get compared because they are both aimed at makers who sell what they make, and both talk about cost of goods. They answer different questions, and the honest way to choose is to notice which question you actually started with.
| Craftybase | This calculator | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A paid subscription web application for handmade-business inventory and manufacturing bookkeeping, per its own product pages. | A single free web page that runs entirely in your browser. |
| The question it answers | What did I make, what did it cost me, what stock do I hold, and what are my numbers at tax time? | Is this one market worth taking, what does it have to sell, and what does the weekend pay me per hour? |
| Time horizon | Ongoing — it is a system of record you keep up to date. | One event, decided in a couple of minutes. |
| What you enter | Materials, recipes, purchases, and sales, kept current over time. | Twenty figures about one show, typed once. |
| Where the data lives | In your account on their service. | Only in your browser tab. There is no account and nothing is uploaded. |
| Cost | Paid, on published subscription tiers. | Free, with no paid tier and nothing withheld. |
Reach for real inventory bookkeeping when you need to know your true cost of goods across a whole catalogue, track raw materials down to the yard and the gram, produce accurate numbers for a tax return, or hold stock levels you cannot keep in your head. A one-page calculator is not a system of record and does not pretend to be — this one keeps nothing at all when you close the tab, which is a deliberate privacy choice and a genuine limitation.
Reach for this calculator when an application is open, the booth fee is $250, the drive is ninety miles, and you have a week to decide. It needs no account and no history: you supply a materials percentage and an average order value, and it returns the sales the day has to make, the share of your table that represents, the hourly rate your expected take actually works out to, and the highest booth fee that would still clear the rate you want for your own hours.
They also compose. A maker who tracks cost of goods properly already knows their materials percentage to a point or two, which is the one input here that most people are guessing at — so good bookkeeping makes this page's answer sharper, not redundant.
Bookkeeping is retrospective by nature: it tells you what a show did after you did it. The decision you are making is prospective — whether to send the application at all. Those need different arithmetic, and in particular they treat unsold stock differently.
Inventory accounting is right to carry unsold stock at cost on your books. This page is right to leave it out of one event's break-even entirely, because the candles you drive home are still yours to sell. Charging a whole table's materials against a single weekend is how a perfectly reasonable market gets written off as a bad one, and it is the most common arithmetic mistake makers report about show season.
Try the free calculator. Open it here — no account, no upload, nothing kept. Or read the method first: how much you need to sell at a craft fair to break even.
No. The go/no-go on one booth needs six things — the fixed cost of getting there, your materials as a share of retail, your card rate, your average order value, the hours you will commit, and the sales you expect — and none of them requires a system of record. Inventory software answers a different and larger question: what your whole catalogue costs to make and what stock you hold. If you already track that properly you will know your materials percentage precisely, which makes this calculator's answer sharper.
Yes, and they compose well. Bookkeeping is retrospective by nature: it tells you what a show did after you did it. Deciding whether to send the application is prospective, and needs different arithmetic — in particular it leaves unsold stock out of the event entirely, because the pieces you drive home are still yours to sell. Inventory accounting is right to carry that stock at cost on your books; a single event's break-even is right to ignore it.
No. There is no account and nothing is uploaded. Every field runs in your browser and nothing survives closing the tab. That is a deliberate privacy choice and also a genuine limitation: this page is not a system of record and does not pretend to be one. The only way figures leave the device is the shareable link you choose to copy, which carries them in the URL fragment — a part of the address a browser never sends to a server.