Why this exists

Every shop that makes things to order eventually builds the same spreadsheet. It works, right up until it doesn't.

It starts as one tab for one job. Then there's a tab per customer, a tab of material prices someone updates when they remember, and a column of hours that only one person knows how to interpret. It survives on the fact that a single person keeps the whole model in their head.

The failure is quiet. Material goes up eleven percent and the quotes don't. A job that looked like it made money turns out to have covered materials and about half the labor. Nobody catches it, because the number that would have shown it was never calculated the same way twice.

Meanwhile the software you'd expect to help is built for a different business. Inventory systems assume you buy a widget, shelve it, and sell the same widget. They have no concept of buying a sheet and consuming square feet, and no real answer for labor — which on custom work is often most of the price.

inventory.chat is the thing in between: a parts database each shop defines for itself, with labor and overhead treated as real costs, and formulas that turn all of it into a price you can defend. Not a warehouse system with a costing tab bolted on.

What we build around

Your shop's model, not ours. The parts database is defined per account. You create the attributes your trade cares about, because there is no schema that fits a cabinet shop and a machine shop equally well, and pretending otherwise is how software ends up with a "notes" field doing all the work.

Every function is a tool. Operations are registered once and exposed to the screens, to the chat, and over MCP. That's why the chat can do what the UI can — it isn't a separate assistant reading your data, it's the same system with a different way in.

The costing engine owns every number. A language model is good at working out what you meant and which operation you wanted. It is not what you want computing your margin. So it doesn't: it selects tools and fills in arguments, and the engine calculates. Ask twice, get the same answer.

Priced per shop. Costing only works when the people doing the work can see and change the numbers. Charging per seat would make you ration exactly the access that makes it useful.

If you run a shop and any of this sounds like your Tuesday, get early access — and tell us where we've got it wrong.