Story Roadmap Contact Join the Journey

Stop renting your inventory software.

VarkHQ was created by a shop owner who refused to pay rent forever for a tool that used to be his. Expected release in early 2027 — join the journey and build this with us.

Your dashboard — customizable smart tiles, sales trends, and open order lists, so you can see what you actually want to see.

Fourteen years. A dying PC. And a SaaS quote that made me laugh — then cry.

I run a small woodworking business from my home shop. For the last fourteen years I tracked my raw materials, purchases, sales, and production work orders using inFlow Inventory On-Premise. It wasn’t fancy. It required a lot of manual inputs. But it was mine. In 2024, they sunset the product and shut down the licensing servers.

Now I'm stuck on one machine.

The license still works — on that one aging computer. When the hard drive (or any other part of the computer) inevitably kicks the bucket, the software goes with it. They offered to migrate me to their new cloud service instead. That’s not a “migration path.” That’s a hostage situation.

Then I priced the cloud — not pretty.

I'd been paying about $180 per year in maintenance for essentially the same software I'd been using for years. Their cloud started at $180 a month — 12x what I was paying — and other stacks like Katana and Cin7 were $300+/mo. Forever. I’m not opposed to paying for good tools. But I refuse to rent my own inventory forever because the industry has decided desktop software is unfashionable.

So I started coding my own software.

Not because I wanted a startup (this is so much work), but because I wanted to keep my shop running. As it progressed, I realized that a lot of other makers and shops were in the same boat. Fighting SaaS rent shouldn't be a solo sport. So VarkHQ was born, and here we are.

Fourteen years of data isn’t a “nice to have.”

Retyping a decade-plus of catalog, customers, and cost history sounds like a punishment, not a plan. So the first serious work was: take a full inFlow database backup and bring it to life in VarkHQ.

  • The whole backup, not a snapshot or CSV import. Catalog, transactions, historical costing — the stuff you’d really miss on Monday morning.
  • I built it because I needed it. If the migrator didn’t work for my shop, the software wasn't worth building. Simple quality bar.
  • History stays history. Complete movement history comes along, so you’re not guessing at the past because of a new app.

Real UI. Real tabs. And a beautiful dark mode.

This is a living mockup of the app surfaces — poke around on a larger screen. Bigger screenshots are coming soon; for now, enjoy the clicky bits.

VarkHQ
Sales orders
Active All Unpaid
Search orders…
Date Sales Order # Customer Total Balance Status
SO-1042
Home Shop · Open
Product Description Qty Price Ext
Merchandise $186.00
Tax $14.88
Order total $200.88

Click an order, edit lines or notes, then Save — totals update live.

Mini app window with working tabs — Sales orders, Inventory, and Work orders. Toggle light/dark, poke the lists, edit an order, and watch totals update.
VarkHQ is a desktop app — the interactive playground works best on a larger screen. Toggle light/dark here for a peek at the look.

The pieces I invented to make the shop run better than before.

I didn’t start with a feature list. I started with the shop annoyances that took far too long to calculate and/or enter by hand — Etsy sales, wood resaws, the usual suspects. These engines (and more than a few features) grew out of that.

StrataCost™ — pick a costing method, keep the movement history, and watch each receipt stay tied to its document.

StrataCost™

I needed costing that remembered history — not a black box that forgot every receipt the moment I changed methods. Switching from manual costing to FIFO or another method doesn’t require starting over.

LocalCore™

My shop Wi‑Fi is… optimistic. It usually works, but I can’t rely on it just to get work done. The software had to run on my own hardware, be reachable anywhere on my local network, and never ask the cloud for permission.

DirectPrint Core™

Because clicking through a print dialog for every thermal label is a great way to question your life choices. Coming next.

Adaptive Job™

Default recipes for the usual jobs, with room to tweak a one-off without inventing a new catalog SKU for every customer who “wants it slightly different.”

RemnantLedger™

Walnut off-cuts are not “scrap.” They’re inventory with a personality. Coming next — so they stop living in a spreadsheet.

VendorFlow™

For when part of the project leaves the building for outside processing and you still want to know where it is. Also next.

Want to see upcoming features and an honest status list? Check the roadmap →

Commerce and Manufacturing

One product, one database. Start where you are — unlock Manufacturing when you need shop-floor depth.

Designed for businesses that buy and sell finished goods.

Main features

  • Inventory, orders, and sales in one place
  • Unlimited locations, transfers & stock adjustments
  • StrataCost™ Engine for FIFO / Manual / Moving Average
  • Dedicated dispositions tracking
  • inFlow On-Premise migrator + CSV mapper

Designed for businesses that make the products they sell.

Everything in Commerce, plus:

  • Production work orders
  • Nested BOMs, boards, species & tags
  • Additional StrataCost™ methods for FEFO / Specific ID
  • Yield / scrap on work orders
  • Workflow modules designed for makers

Upgrading to Manufacturing is as simple as activating a license — no data is ever lost or erased. See what’s shipping →

Software you actually own.

Buy once. Keep using it. Updates and support if you want them. Your data stays yours forever. We’re a shop that builds for shops, not a rent collector with a login screen.

Come fight the rent with us.

Expected public release in early 2027. Be among the first to run your business rent-free. Check the roadmap anytime — suggest ideas, poke holes, and keep us honest.

Join the journey