How Much Does MRP Software Really Cost in 2026? Real Numbers, Including the Ones Vendors Don't List
This post contains affiliate links — see our Affiliate Disclosure. All prices below were verified July 2026 and rounded; vendors adjust pricing, so confirm before you buy.
Ask a software vendor what MRP costs and you'll get a starting price. Ask a manufacturer a year in and you'll get a different, larger number. We stand on the buying side of this with customers during site surveys, so here is the whole answer for the small-manufacturer segment: real subscription prices, the hidden line items, and what a sane first-year budget looks like.
The three pricing models
Small-manufacturer software prices one of three ways. Per-user pricing (MRPeasy) scales with headcount: $49–$149 per user per month by tier, two-user minimum, and after ten users each additional block of ten runs a flat $79 — friendly to small office teams, creeping upward as the floor gets logins. Flat-tier pricing (Katana, inFlow) charges by plan regardless of seats: Katana from roughly $299/month (with a free plan below it), inFlow from $186/month — expensive for two people, a bargain for fifteen. Quote-based pricing (Fishbowl, and every enterprise ERP above this class) means a sales call and, for true mid-market ERP, an annual bill in the five figures before implementation. For the businesses we serve, the first two models are where the value lives.
What the money actually buys in 2026
System | Entry cost | Typical small-team cost | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
MRPeasy | $98/mo (2 users, Starter) | 12 users on Professional ≈ $769/mo | Per-seat creep; some features tier-gated |
Katana | Free plan; paid ~$299/mo | ~$299–$899/mo flat, unlimited users | One-time onboarding fee (~$2,000+) on some tiers; history of price increases |
inFlow | $186/mo (~$149 on annual) | $186–$436/mo | BOM/work-orders is an add-on (~$39–$299/mo); order caps by tier |
The hidden costs — where budgets actually break
The subscription is the visible tip. Budget for these five below the waterline. Onboarding and implementation fees: Katana attaches a one-time onboarding charge of roughly $2,000+ on some tiers; MRPeasy's paid consulting partners are optional but commonly used. Add-ons and tier gates: inFlow's manufacturing features cost extra; MRPeasy locks some capabilities (like barcode scanning) to higher tiers; integration counts are capped on inFlow's lower plans. Your own hours — the biggest real cost: cleaning item lists, building BOMs, entering suppliers, and training the floor eats 40–80 internal hours for a typical small shop; at loaded labor rates that's often more than year one of the subscription itself. Hardware: scan-based workflows need thermal printers, labels, and scanners — figure well under $2,500 to start (our barcode setup guide itemizes it, and the printers are what we sell). Data quality debt: if machine speeds, batch sizes, and yields go in wrong, you'll pay twice — once to enter them, once to fix the schedules they corrupted.
Two sample first-year budgets
A three-person D2C brand (sauces, cosmetics, coffee) taking the low road: Katana's free plan or MRPeasy Starter at $98/month ($1,176/year), roughly 50 internal hours of setup, and about $1,500 of barcode hardware — call it $3,000–$5,000 all-in for year one, with the software line under $1,200. A twelve-person factory doing routed production: MRPeasy Professional at ≈$769/month ($9,228/year) or Katana's upper tiers at $899/month plus onboarding, 80+ internal hours, fuller hardware — a realistic $12,000–$18,000 year one. Both numbers sound large until you price the alternative below.
The ROI test
Weigh the budget against three ordinary disasters: one production day lost to a material stockout (line labor + missed shipments — for most of our customers, four figures per day), one mis-shipped or mis-picked pallet, and one lot-trace request you can't answer, which in food or supplements can escalate from inconvenience to recalling everything. Any single one typically exceeds a year of small-team software. That's the honest case for buying — not features, but avoided Fridays.
Spend nothing first
Every serious option lets you rehearse for free: MRPeasy's 30-day no-card trial, Katana's free plan, inFlow's 14-day trial. Pick using our comparisons — Katana vs MRPeasy, MRPeasy vs inFlow — then run one real order through the trial before a dollar leaves the building. And if the numbers feeding the system need checking, that's a site survey: contact Tecma at sales@tecmausa.com or (786) 952-7575.
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