Stocky is shutting down August 31. Here's what small Shopify stores can do

If you run Stocky on your Shopify store, you’ve probably already seen the banner or the email. If you haven’t, here’s the short version: Stocky is going away, the timeline is real, and one part of it, your supplier data, will not survive the migration unless you save it yourself. This post covers what’s happening and when, what breaks along the way, and an honest look at what small stores can actually switch to, including the free and cheap options that already exist today.

The timeline, confirmed

Stocky’s shutdown has happened in three stages, and if you’ve used it for a while you’ve likely already felt the first one without knowing what it was.

Mid-2025. Stocky quietly stopped supporting inventory transfers between locations and min/max forecasting. No announcement, no banner. If you manage a multi-location store and noticed transfers acting strange or forecasting numbers looking off around then, this is why. We are deliberately vague on the exact day: secondary sources give different dates for it, and we could not find a Shopify announcement pinning one down. Merchants on the Shopify Community forum reported the app becoming “painful to use” around this time, before anyone had said the word “sunset” out loud.

February 2, 2026. Stocky was delisted from the Shopify App Store. If you already have it installed, it still runs, but nobody can install it fresh anymore.

August 31, 2026. The real deadline. Stocky stops working as an app and every Stocky API stops with it. Shopify’s own help documentation confirms the app “will no longer be available after August 31st, 2026,” and points merchants toward Shopify’s built-in inventory tracking as the path forward.

You do get one grace period, and it is worth knowing about because it is easy to panic without it. Shopify’s migration guide says you will have “read-only access to export your data for at least 90 days after that date.” So the app dies on August 31, but your data is not locked away that night. What you cannot do after August 31 is keep running your purchasing on it.

That gives you until the end of August. Depending on when you’re reading this, that’s either a comfortable runway or uncomfortably close.

The part that actually needs urgency: your supplier data

Most of what’s in Stocky can be exported before the shutdown. Historical purchase orders and inventory reports have an export path if you go looking for it. Supplier data does not. Shopify says so plainly in its own migration guide: “Suppliers can’t be exported from Stocky.” InflowInventory’s writeup on the sunset reaches the same conclusion, that “supplier data cannot be exported from Stocky, so you’ll need to document this manually.” That means contacts, lead times, minimum order quantities, whatever you’ve built up in Stocky’s supplier records, none of it comes out through an export button.

This is the one piece of the whole transition worth doing first, before you evaluate a single replacement app. Open Stocky, go through your supplier list, and put the contact info, lead times, and MOQs somewhere durable, a spreadsheet, a shared doc, anything outside the app. It takes an afternoon. To be straight with you about the deadline: the 90-day read-only window means you can still read your suppliers off the screen after August 31, so this is not a your-data-vanishes-at-midnight situation. But there is no export button coming, it is a copy-it-out-by-hand job either way, and it gets no easier once the app is frozen and off your daily path.

What breaks, and when

To be specific about the actual impact:

• Already broken (since July 2025): stock transfers between locations, min/max forecasting.
• Broken now (since February 2026): new installs. If you’re not already on Stocky, you can’t get on it.
• Breaking August 31, 2026: everything else. Purchase order creation, supplier communication tools, stocktakes, reporting (ABC analysis, best-sellers, low-stock alerts), the works.

If you’re a single or two-location retail store using Stocky mainly for its low-stock alerts and basic reorder suggestions, rather than heavy multi-warehouse transfers, the good news is you were probably using the smallest slice of what Stocky did. The bad news is you still need something in place before the end of August, or you’re back to checking shelves by eye.

Option one: Shopify’s native tools

Shopify’s own recommendation is to move to the built-in Admin inventory tracking, plus a separate barcode-labels app if you need that physical workflow. This is free, since it’s already part of Shopify, and it will track what you have on hand.

What it won’t do: demand forecasting, automated reorder-point calculations, velocity-based restock suggestions, safety stock buffers, supplier lead-time tracking, or a low-stock email that tells you when to act. Shopify Admin can show you a number. It won’t tell you when that number crossed a line you care about. If the reason you liked Stocky was the alert, not the ledger, native Shopify doesn’t replace that part.

Option two: the enterprise-grade forecasting tools

A handful of well-funded tools have been actively courting Stocky refugees, and they’re worth naming because they do real, sophisticated work, just not necessarily work sized for a small store.

• Prediko runs $49/mo up to roughly $100K in trailing GMV, scaling up from there, with AI-driven forecasting, full purchase order workflows, and WMS integrations. It’s built a dedicated page specifically for Stocky’s shutdown, which tells you how seriously it’s chasing this migration.
• Cogsy publishes a single “All in one” plan at $199/mo, aimed at demand planning and “what-if” scenario modeling for brands that have outgrown a spreadsheet but aren’t running enterprise-scale operations yet. Its page title advertises plans from $49/mo, but no such plan appears on the pricing page itself.
• Fabrikator runs $79 to $350/mo depending on revenue tier, combining AI forecasting with automated replenishment and PO creation. Its own FAQ still quotes an older $99 entry price, so check which one you are quoted.
• Inventory Planner, from Sage, publishes its Essentials plan at $119.99/mo on the App Store, which is roughly $1,440 a year. Reviewers describe it as overkill for most direct-to-consumer brands, and its Essentials listing sits at 2.8 stars.

These are legitimate tools. They’re just built and priced for a different store than the one running one or two physical locations on a lean budget. If your store is small, this tier is probably more tool, and more money, than the job requires.

Option three: the budget tools that exist today

Here’s the part worth knowing before you assume you have to pay enterprise prices: a handful of inexpensive, dedicated apps already do low-stock alerting and basic reorder math, and some of them have been doing it for a while with real review histories behind them.

• Assisty has a free tier (six months of sales history, basic tracking) and paid plans from $19/mo up to $239/mo at the top end. It’s the most-reviewed of the four budget apps we name here, sitting at 4.8 stars across 342 reviews, and offers AI reorder suggestions, low-stock alerts, and purchase order tooling.
• Stockbot Low Stock Alert has a free tier for stores under 200 products, then $9/mo for its Alerts plan and $25/mo if you want its forecasting tier. It sends store, product, and variant-level alerts on a daily, hourly, or weekly schedule.
• Stockie starts at $4.99/mo for basic low-stock alerts, with forecasting and reorder-date prediction added at its $29.99/mo Pro tier.
• iAlert has a free plan, then $2.99/mo for its Basic plan (covering 1,000 SKUs), scaling to $9.99/mo for its Enterprise tier. It supports email and Slack alerts with per-variant thresholds, and holds a 4.8-star rating across 86 reviews.

App Store ratings and review counts on this page were re-checked on August 5, 2026. Every price was re-checked on August 2, 2026, against each vendor’s own published pricing page or App Store listing. Pricing and ratings move, so check each listing before you commit.

If your actual job is “tell me when something’s about to run out, with a rough number to reorder,” these apps already do that, today, for less than the price of a coffee subscription in some cases. It’s worth trying the free tiers first before assuming you need to spend real money to replace what Stocky did for you.

What to check before you pick one

A few questions worth asking of any tool on this list, budget or enterprise, before you commit: Does it alert on the unit you actually track, per-SKU, per-variant, or per-location, rather than only a store-wide threshold that doesn’t match how your shelves actually run out? Is the reorder quantity based on your own sales history, or a generic rule of thumb that ignores your seasonality? And what happens if the alert just doesn’t fire? A missed low-stock alert is the same problem as no alert at all, and it’s worth knowing an app’s failure mode before a stockout tells you the hard way. Not sure how much a stockout is actually costing you in the meantime? Run your numbers through this free stockout cost calculator and see the math.

What we considered building, and didn’t

We build Kelso: Back in Stock Alerts, and this Stocky shutdown was the kind of news cycle that made us want to build the other half of the same problem: not “tell my customers when it’s back,” but “tell me before it runs out in the first place.” We ran a page for a few weeks to see how many small stores wanted a reliability-first reorder alert tool. We are not building it. Not enough stores asked, and we have since moved onto a different product. The budget apps listed above already do this job today, and that is the honest answer to the question this post asks.