# Materials stock and reorder alerts for makers

Materials stock and reorder alerts for makers is a SaaS idea for candle, soap, jewellery and print makers selling through their own online store, priced to test at $15 a month per maker. Makers track wax, jars, wicks and labels in their heads or a notebook. With it, makers list what goes into each product, sales count down their materials, and they get a warning before anything runs out.

_Published 19 Oct 2026. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build._

## What problem does it solve?

Makers track wax, jars, wicks and labels in their heads or a notebook. They discover a material has run out when orders arrive, and a busy weekend’s orders ship late.

**Why now:** Makers now sell on several channels at once, so stock is used faster and is harder to track by memory.

## What do they use today?

Makers tend to eyeball the shelves and keep a spreadsheet that gets updated when they remember. Product costs are worked out once on a calculator and rarely revisited when supplier prices change.

## How does it work?

A jewellery maker lists silver wire, clasps and gift boxes with their units, suppliers and prices, then sets a recipe for each necklace showing what it uses. Once sales are imported from the online store, the stock counts go down, and an alert with a suggested reorder amount arrives before the clasps run out. Each product’s cost also updates with current material prices.

## What goes in the first version?

- Materials list with units, suppliers and cost
- Recipe per product: what each item uses
- Sales import from the online store to count stock down
- Low-stock alerts with a suggested reorder amount
- Cost per product based on current material prices

## Who pays, and how much?

- **Who pays:** Candle, soap, jewellery and print makers selling through their own online store
- **Price to test:** $15 a month per maker

A solo maker has one workshop and one shop, so a flat monthly price per maker is simple to understand. Makers already pay monthly for their online store, so one more subscription fits the pattern.

## How to test it in 7 days

1. Ask ten makers in maker groups on Facebook how they last found out a material had run out.
2. Build one maker’s recipes in a spreadsheet and check it against a week of real sales.
3. Share a landing page at $15 a month in two maker groups and count sign-ups.

## Where to find the first customers

- Handmade seller groups on Facebook
- Craft business and handmade seller subreddits
- Craft supply wholesalers who email their maker customers

## What are the risks?

- Inventory apps exist; this must stay simple enough for one-person shops.
- Recipes take time to enter, so setup must feel quick on day one.

## How to build it on shipanysaas

4 of the parts it needs are already in the kit. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.

**Already in the kit:** Billing, Admin panel, Emails, In-app notifications

**You build:**

- Materials and recipe lists per product
- Sales import from one store platform
- Low-stock rules and reorder suggestions

[Get the kit](https://www.shipanysaas.com/pricing)

### The starting prompt

```text
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase. Help me build the first version of Materials stock and reorder alerts for makers.

Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it.

## The product
- What it does: Makers list what goes into each product, sales count down their materials, and they get a warning before anything runs out.
- Who pays: Candle, soap, jewellery and print makers selling through their own online store
- Their problem: Makers track wax, jars, wicks and labels in their heads or a notebook. They discover a material has run out when orders arrive, and a busy weekend’s orders ship late.
- Price to test: $15 a month per maker (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts)

## Build only this first version
1. Materials list with units, suppliers and cost
2. Recipe per product: what each item uses
3. Sales import from the online store to count stock down
4. Low-stock alerts with a suggested reorder amount
5. Cost per product based on current material prices

## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it
- Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments
- Admin panel: a super-admin panel that needs two-step sign-in
- Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer
- In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app

## New code it needs
- Materials and recipe lists per product
- Sales import from one store platform
- Low-stock rules and reorder suggestions

## How to work
1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK.
2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files.
3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next.

## Rules
- Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel.
- Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are.

Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
```

### Guides for the parts it uses

- [How to add Stripe embedded checkout to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/nextjs-supabase-stripe-embedded-checkout)
- [How to add in-app notifications to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/nextjs-supabase-in-app-notifications)
- [How to add Resend email to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/nextjs-supabase-resend-email)

## More ideas: Online shops

- [Lost and damaged parcel claims tracker for shops](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/lost-parcel-claims-tracker): Online shops log every lost or damaged parcel, keep the photos and proof, and file carrier claims before the deadline passes.
- [Product photo tracker and shot lists for shops](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/product-photo-shot-lists): Shops see which products lack photos, build a shot list for the photo day, and share it with their photographer.
- [Product gifting tracker for small brands](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/product-gifting-tracker): Small brands track which creators got free products, when they shipped, whether they posted, and which gifts led to sales.

- [All SaaS ideas](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas)
- [Try the free generator](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas#generator)