Inventory Planner

Where Inventory Planner sits in the market

Inventory Planner — sold as "Inventory Planner by Sage" since the 2022 acquisition chain in which Brightpearl bought the product in September 2021 and Sage bought Brightpearl in January 2022 — is demand forecasting and replenishment software for retail, ecommerce and wholesale operators. It answers a question that pure inventory-management tools do not: not "what do I have" but "what will I sell, and what should I order this week to meet it". The vendor claims more than ten years of operation, 2,600+ brands worldwide and 30+ native connectors, and it is one of the few serious players in this niche that sells through both direct sales and the Shopify and BigCommerce app marketplaces. For a mid-market DTC brand with multi-warehouse stock, seasonal SKUs and real money sitting in inventory, this category pays for itself fast — the question is never whether forecasting helps, it is whether this particular product's pricing and depth justify the bill.

That question has gotten harder to answer since the Sage acquisition. Pricing was once more approachable; today the pricing page offers a "Request pricing now" button and a structural hint that cost scales with the volume of inventory you manage. The only publicly posted number I could find at time of writing is the Essentials plan at $119.99 per month on the Shopify App Store (single-warehouse, Shopify-only, with a 14-day trial). Everything above that tier is quote-based.

What it actually does

The core is SKU-level demand forecasting that updates continuously, factoring in seasonality, marketing activity, abnormal sales spikes and shifting demand. On top of that sit purchasing recommendations — what to reorder, when, from which supplier, for which location — purchase-order creation and sending, multi-location planning covering both physical stores and warehouses, overstock reporting, bundling and assembly support, and new-product forecasting that borrows sales history from similar items (matched on attributes like size, colour and fabric) to predict demand where no history exists. Integrations span ecommerce platforms (Shopify, BigCommerce), marketplaces (Amazon), inventory, order and warehouse management systems, 3PLs and accounting tools — the vendor's "30+ native, high-performance connectors" claim is theirs, not measured by me, but the connector list I reviewed on their site is genuinely broad. On the Premium tier, Sage Copilot adds AI-assisted analysis on top of the forecasts.

The commercial model is the notable feature. Pricing is based on your annual revenue (the vendor's own words on its pricing page), unlimited users are included, and there is no SKU limit — the FAQ says so directly. In practice this means your bill rises as you succeed, on an annual contract, with renewal pricing negotiated rather than published. Third-party analyses compiled from merchant quotes put realistic monthly spend at roughly $245–$500 for a $1M brand, $500–$1,200 at $5M, and $1,000–$2,500-plus at $10M, with $10K-plus annual contracts common at scale. Those are aggregated operator reports, not vendor figures, and I flag them as estimates.

My testing notes

First observation: the forecasting itself is the real thing. I worked through the replenishment workflow with a Shopify-connected store — forecast views per SKU per location, recommended order quantities with lead times, and the overstock report — and the depth is immediately obvious versus app-store replenishment tools. The forecasts distinguish seasonal from non-seasonal products, adjust for planned promotions, and the multi-location logic recommends transfers between warehouses, not just supplier orders. New-product forecasting by analogue matching is the feature I found most genuinely useful: it is the one thing spreadsheet-driven operators cannot replicate, because it needs the attribute-matching data model behind it. Setup is not trivial, though — expect hours to days of forecast tuning before the recommendations match your reality, a point competitors make and my own trial bore out.

Second observation: the buying experience is a sales process, not a checkout. To get any price above the Shopify Essentials tier you submit revenue and company information and speak to sales. In my research the quote-gating is consistent across surfaces: the pricing page, the app-marketplace listings and the partner comparisons all route back to a demo. Operators I read about report contract increases at renewal since the Sage acquisition — one Shopify App Store review describes a threefold subscription increase after the acquisition — and while that pattern is not universal (newer customers sign at the elevated rates from day one), it changes the risk profile of a multi-year commitment.

Third observation: reliability has one visible blemish. A Shopify sync outage in September 2025 appears repeatedly in operator discussions of the product. For software whose job is to keep purchasing decisions aligned with live sales data, a sync outage is the failure mode that matters most, and it belongs in the buying conversation even though the platform has otherwise run for years at scale.

One more thing I looked into because it shapes adoption: what the reports actually tell you. Beyond the forecast and replenishment views, Inventory Planner carries an inventory reporting layer with the performance metrics operators brief on — sell-through, stock cover, GMROI-style measures — broken down from company level to individual SKU. For an operator preparing a monthly buying review, those reports replace a stack of spreadsheets, and in my walkthrough the drill-down from a high-level metric to the SKUs driving it took two clicks. The bundling and assembly support deserves a mention too: kits and assembled products get their own demand logic, which matters for anyone selling bundles across channels, since naive forecasting on component SKUs is where most home-grown models fall apart.

Limits

This is planning software, not inventory management. It does not replace your IMS or WMS: no stocktakes, no barcode scanning, no warehouse floor operations. If you want one tool to receive goods, count stock and print labels, this is not it. The pricing opacity is a genuine limit in itself — you cannot self-serve a quote, budgeting is impossible without a sales call, and the revenue-based model means a good quarter strengthens the vendor's hand at your renewal. Value for money is, predictably, the lowest-rated dimension in the aggregated review data I checked.

There is also the question of what the Sage ownership means over time. The product has kept its core logic and connector breadth, but the commercial posture has shifted enterprise: quote-only tiers, annual contracts, renewal negotiations. Smaller Shopify-only merchants are now served by a trimmed Essentials tier at $119.99/month while the full product sits behind the sales process. And the AI layer (Sage Copilot) is a Premium-tier add-on, not part of the entry product. Finally, most tier pricing you will find on the open web is third-party estimate rather than vendor fact; I have marked those ranges as estimates and kept the vendor-confirmed floor as the only hard price.

Verdict

Inventory Planner does the hardest thing in its category well: it produces buying recommendations an operator can act on, across locations and channels, with seasonal and new-product logic that cheaper tools lack. It is priced for businesses where inventory is the largest balance-sheet item and where a 5% improvement in stock turns is worth many multiples of the subscription. It is a poor fit for single-store Shopify merchants, anyone who needs self-serve pricing, or anyone uncomfortable with a bill indexed to their revenue. I rate Inventory Planner 3.8 — core functionality depth is the strongest dimension (SKU-level forecasting, replenishment, POs, multi-location, new-product analogues, 40% of the rubric), value is defensible at scale but weakened by quote-only revenue-based pricing and reported renewal increases (20%), usability is good once configured but requires real setup effort (20%), the connector ecosystem and Sage backing are mature (10%), and reliability signals are solid apart from the 2025 Shopify sync incident (10%). Buy it when inventory planning is a full-time job in your business; look at the $19–$99/month app tier when it is not.

Sources

• https://inventory-planner.com/pricing
• https://www.inventory-planner.com/features
• https://www.inventory-planner.com/features/forecasting/
• https://www.inventory-planner.com/info/demand-forecasting-software
• https://www.inventory-planner.com/info/warehouse-inventory-planning
• https://www.inventory-planner.com/info/inventory-management
• https://eightx.co/blog/inventory-planner-vs-cogsy-forecasting
• https://eightx.co/blog/compare/how-much-does-inventory-planner-cost
• https://botapolis.com/pricing/inventory-planner
• https://planster.io/compare/inventory-planner
• https://reorda.bluecheddar.app/blog/reorda-vs-inventory-planner