The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2026
Craftplan bets a micro-bakery needs a lean open-source micro-ERP, not an enterprise SaaS
His wife's micro-bakery found every ERP too expensive or too generic, so he built and open-sourced a micro-ERP for small-batch reality: 577 pts, 1.1k stars.
Craftplan
What the business is
Open-source micro-ERP for artisanal manufacturers: recipes as versioned BOMs with cost rollups, inventory with lot traceability and allergen tracking, orders, production batch planning, purchasing, and CRM.
How it started
The founder's wife was planning to open a micro-bakery. Shopping for production-management software, they found the market split: tools priced for industrial factories, or horizontal products too generic to model recipes, allergens, and small-batch lots. Because the actual workflows of small-batch manufacture 'aren't that complex', he built one and open-sourced it, posting 'Show HN: Craftplan – I built my wife a production management tool for her bakery' on 2026-02-01.
What happened
The post took off — 577 points, 167 comments — and the discussion turned into a referendum on whether small businesses need SaaS ERPs at all. A follow-up Show HN on 2026-02-03 recast it as a 'micro-ERP for small-scale manufacturers'. The repo grew into a fuller platform: catalog management, inventory control, order processing, production planning, purchasing, and CRM, with CSV bulk import, iCal calendar feeds, JSON:API and GraphQL access, and a Docker Compose deployment with PostgreSQL and MinIO.
How it ended up
Still maintained as open source under AGPL-3.0 as of 2026-09-03, repositioned as 'self-hosted software for managing artisanal D2C micro-businesses'; 1.1k GitHub stars. The original fly.dev live demo is no longer reachable.
Background
Craftplan began as a favor: the founder's wife was planning to open a micro-bakery, and every production-management product they evaluated was either priced for industrial factories or too generic to model how a small-batch baker actually works — recipes, allergens, lot traceability, cost per batch. His answer was to build the tool around the real workflow and open-source it, in a field where every incumbent sells seats.
Under the hood it is a micro-ERP: versioned bills of materials with cost rollups, inventory with lot traceability, demand forecasting and allergen tracking, order management, production batch planning, and purchasing — built with Elixir, the Ash Framework, Phoenix LiveView, and PostgreSQL, deployable on a single server via Docker Compose and licensed AGPL-3.0.
Posted to Hacker News on 2026-02-01 as a tool built for his wife's bakery, it drew 577 points and 167 comments. The reception split between bakers recognizing the gap and ERP skeptics debating whether small businesses need SaaS at all. By 2026-09-03 the GitHub repo had passed 1.1k stars and the project had repositioned itself as a self-hosted ERP for artisanal D2C micro-businesses.
What has to be true
- Starting from one workflow kept the tool one-tenth the size of competitors; small-batch production is simpler than factory ERP, so specificity was the product.
- Open-sourcing under AGPL-3.0 dissolved build-vs-buy: a bakery never pays per seat, and skeptics can run their own instance; the loudest HN complaint became the best sales argument.
- The wife's real bakery was the live spec: cost rollups and allergen tracking came from an actual food business's workflow, not analyst reports.
What can be applied
A vertical wedge smaller than anyone will fund — one micro-bakery — can expose a real market gap, and shipping it open-source turns skeptics into contributors instead of competitors.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-03 the repository is maintained as an 'open-source ERP for small-scale artisanal manufacturers', with 1.1k stars, CSV bulk import, calendar feeds, and API access; the original fly.dev demo is down. The author continues shipping other open-source tools in parallel, so Craftplan's fate as a business (hosted SaaS on top of the open core) remains unwritten. For now it stands as proof that a one-bakery wedge can hold its own against the ERP incumbents.
Sources
- Show HN: Craftplan – I built my wife a production management tool for her bakery
- GitHub - puemos/craftplan: Self-hosted software for managing artisanal D2C micro-businesses
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