Stokka doesn't have a free trial anymore. I deleted it.
When it launched in April โ seven weeks after I decided to build it โ the deal was seven days with everything unlocked, then $300 or stop. That was the plan on paper. Three months of watching actual shop owners install it made it clear the plan was the wrong shape, so the trial is gone, the price came down, and the product now comes in two editions instead of one.
Here's what changed, and the reasoning behind each piece.
A trial measures the wrong thing
A seven-day timer asks a question a shop owner can't answer in seven days.
Evaluating inventory software genuinely means entering your products, receiving one real delivery into it, ringing a real week of sales, and then checking whether the number on the screen matches what's on the shelf. That's not an afternoon's work for someone who also has a shop to run. Day three is a delivery day. Day five his supplier doesn't show up. By day seven he has entered forty products and learned nothing.
So the timer is gone. What replaced it is the full desktop application, capped at 100 products, with no expiry, no card and no nag screen. The paid modules are switched off โ that's the only other fence.
One hundred products is a real limit, not a decorative one. A mini-market goes through it in an afternoon. A phone repair shop might never reach it, which means some shops will run Stokka for years and never pay me anything. I've made my peace with that. A shop that outgrows the cap already knows the software works, and that's a far better sales conversation than a countdown. The shops I keep meeting are too small for an ERP and too large for Excel, and most of them want to try something for a month before they trust it with the till.
A trial tests whether you had a free week. A free version tests whether the software is any good.
It split in two
The question I kept getting after launch was some version of: can my three staff use it?
The honest answer was no, and I had nothing else to sell them. Stokka was one Windows application on one machine, and every attempt to imagine three cashiers sharing it ended somewhere bad. So it split.
Desktop is what it always was, and more of it. One shop, one machine, one person, and no internet โ ever, not "works offline when the connection drops". Your data sits on your own PC. You buy it once at $250 and it keeps working.
Cloud is the new one: any browser, staff accounts with roles and per-user permissions, one database per shop, $19 a month with five users included. It needs the internet, because that's what a browser is.
The boundary between them is deliberate, and I'd rather state it plainly than let someone find it after paying. Staff accounts, roles, manager overrides, named registers, the price-check kiosk and the audit log are Cloud only. Every one of them needs a person to name, and the desktop edition has exactly one person at one machine. That isn't a port I haven't finished. It's a line I drew.
The register arrived after launch and is now sold on its own, as a module: shifts opened against a counted float, a Z-report at close, weighed goods and scale labels, quick keys. On Cloud it adds named terminals and manager approvals. It's the strongest chapter in the product and the one where the edition matters most.
There is no quantity box
This is the design decision I'm most attached to, and the one people argue with most.
You cannot type a quantity into Stokka. There is no editable quantity field anywhere in either edition. Stock moves when a delivery is received, a sale is rung, a return comes back, an adjustment is written or a count sheet is confirmed โ and every one of those is a document with a date, a reason and a trail behind it.
Owners ask for the box. It sounds like convenience: the count is wrong, let me just fix the number and get on with my day. But the moment a number can be typed over, every number in the system becomes an opinion. Your margin is an opinion. Your shrinkage is an opinion. And the first time the figures look wrong, nobody can tell you whether the shelf lied or somebody's fingers did.
The same thinking runs through the parts nobody sees until they matter:
- A stock count doesn't punish the till. Confirming a count sheet applies the live difference, not the difference against a snapshot โ so a sale rung while the sheet was out on the floor never gets booked as shrinkage.
- Late costs still land. Freight billed three weeks after the goods arrived can still be added to that order, and if the product has since sold out, Stokka names it instead of quietly absorbing the cost.
- History doesn't move. Money figures on a confirmed document freeze at confirmation. Changing a price today cannot re-price yesterday.
What it still does not do
Every line below was considered and deliberately rejected. Finding this out now is cheaper for both of us than finding it out after you've paid.
- Multiple locations or warehouses. One shop, one stock figure.
- Accounting proper. No chart of accounts, no journals, no double entry. It doesn't replace your accountant, and it isn't trying to.
- Sales orders, delivery notes and price lists. Which puts wholesale and distribution out of scope.
- Restaurant operations. No tables, no floor plan, no kitchen orders.
- Loyalty points, coupons and gift cards. A corner shop that wants these usually wants a marketing system, not an inventory one.
And to be explicit about the word: Stokka is not an ERP. It's inventory and sales management for a small shop. If you need payroll, projects, CRM and the other forty modules, you need a different category of software and I'll happily tell you so.
What it costs now
Four numbers, and none of them have an asterisk:
- Free โ $0, desktop, up to 100 products, no expiry.
- Desktop โ $250 one-time, unlimited products. Free patches and minor updates; major version upgrades are paid.
- Cloud โ $19 a month with five users included, then $6 per extra user.
- Modules โ point of sale, manufacturing, pharmacy. The first is $150 on desktop or $15 a month on Cloud; every one after it is $50, or $5 a month.
The launch post quoted $300 with a $75-a-year renewal for continued updates. Prices normally travel in one direction, so it's worth saying why this one went the other way: I'd rather be under the monthly cost of the wrong tool than defend a number, and a desktop licence you paid for shouldn't have a renewal date attached to it at all. You bought it. It runs.
The full spec sheet, the screenshots and the eight shop types it was designed against are on the Stokka product page โ including the honest list of what it doesn't do, which is longer there than it is here.
