The gap between a spreadsheet and $30,000 a year

Six weeks into building Crown QMS, a food manufacturing ERP vendor got in touch with us, reaching out about our production needs for Bark & Bitter. They were a real company, with a real, mature product, not a fly-by-night operation. The pitch was that we were running on spreadsheets and ought to consider something better.

They were right about the spreadsheets. We were running Bark & Bitter on a spreadsheet-and-Google-Docs arrangement that had already failed us once. So I asked the only question that mattered (to start): what does it cost? (I already had a feeling what kind of answer to expect)

The answer came back quickly and without evasion, which I appreciated. Most of their deals land between eighteen and thirty thousand dollars a year.

Now, while I appreciate that there was an offer to offset costs, there wasn't any scenario I could imagine to bridge the gap between my current state of $0 and their proposed $18,000+. If you've found yourself here, I suspect you might be in a similar boat.

Who that price is actually for

An easy takeaway of this story could be that enterprise software is a rip-off. That's not quite my point, though: a number that size is a statement about the size of business it expects to be talking to.

So it is worth knowing who is actually in this industry.

Statistics Canada tracks food manufacturers turning over between $30,000 and $5 million a year - small and mid-sized producers, with just over 7,000 Canadian food businesses included in their 2024 numbers. The average revenue per business came in at $750,200, but the average in this band is doing a lot of work, with the top quarter average of $2.2 million/year skewing numbers upward. The more accurate number that describes the bulk of the small producers in the Canadian Food & Beverage industry is the median annual sales of $327,000. Much closer to where our own business was sitting at the time of the pitch.

Sharper still: half of Canadian food manufacturers in that range turn over less than $327,000 a year. A quarter turn over less than $103,000 per year, which is about where CFIA draws the line for not having to write your Preventive Control Plan down at all.

Now, compare the quote against that.

• $18,000 a year is 5.5% of the median producer's entire revenue

• $30,000 a year is 9.2%

• At the 25th percentile, $18,000 is more than 17%

And that is the licence alone. Implementation is quoted separately and, in this category, usually is not published at all. Nobody is running a food business on five to ten per cent of revenue going to software. That is not a tight budget, it is an impossible one.

What the distance between the two scenarios actually looks like

On one side, a spreadsheet. Free, familiar and quietly failing: it doesn't hold lot genealogy, it doesn't version your written program automatically, and it comes apart the first time a supplier calls about an ingredient lot or unintentional data loss happens.

On the other side, a four-or-five-figure annual commitment, with a discovery call before you even have a reasonable ballpark number, and a (likely) sizeable implementation fee on top of that.

There's a long way between those two scenarios.

So we went back and checked it properly. In August 2026 we opened the public pricing page of every food-specific platform in the category: five of ten published a price, and the published ones run from $19 a month to $499 a month. Against that same median producer, $499 a month is about 1.8% of revenue and $19 a month is under a tenth of one per cent. There is a middle, and it is not close to the ERP end.

So the middle exists and is nearly invisible. If your only two reference points are "spreadsheet" and "eighteen thousand a year," staying on the spreadsheet is the rational choice — and then feeling vaguely guilty about it becomes part of the job. Even worse? When you get that inevitable inspection call and the dread sets in firmly within your gut.

That's the real failure in this category. Not gouging. A lack of availability, and a visibility problem for the middle tier solutions that quietly push small manufacturers into deferral.

The capability gap is smaller than the price gap

In fairness, an ERP is a bigger system than what we have built. It runs purchasing workflows, costing, capacity planning, and usually talks to your accounting system or platform. We don't do those things, with Crown and if you do need them, you need an ERP and this article isn't for you.

But much of what an ERP is sold on, a small manufacturer will not touch in year one, or in some cases, even into year 5+. What you will touch is receiving, inventory, production records tied to lot codes, your written program, and the ability to answer a traceability question quickly. Crown does receiving, inventory and some production planning today, alongside the records and program side. Our inventory is deliberately lean rather than an ERP replacement, and there are pieces still in build -- our product roadmap can be found here.

The honest summary is that the price difference between the two ends of this market is somewhere around fifty to a hundred times. The difference in what a single-facility manufacturer with a handful of SKUs would actually use, day to day, is nothing like fifty to a hundred times.

The gap between those two ratios is the whole reason Crown exists.

Why I kept building

I didn't set out to build my own software. I set out to get Bark & Bitter's records in order, and all that I could find was either not enough or not affordable, and half of what sat in between wouldn't give me a number without a call first.

By the time that quote landed I had already spent April pricing this market, so the numbers weren't news. What the quote did was confirm the shape of it: that the gap was structural rather than something I had failed to research properly, and that nobody at the top had much reason to come down and fill it (and who can blame them at those subcription fees?). I was left endlessly frustrated, feeling that there should be a solution for small manufacturers in a similar boat as me, and thus, Crown QMS was born.

What to take from this if you are shopping

Work out what you actually need before you accept anyone's framing of what you need.

Write down the four or five things you will genuinely use in the first year. Then price that, not the category. If purchasing, costing and accounting integration are on your list, you are looking for an ERP and you should budget accordingly. If they are not, be careful about being sold one.

Then do the percentage. Take any quote, divide it by your actual annual revenue, and decide whether that share is one you would defend to yourself in a year. It is a cruder test than a feature matrix and it is much harder to argue with.

We wrote up what each platform in the category publishes and what actually sits inside a subscription, because those numbers are hard to find, and that difficulty is the whole problem.

The short version

A food manufacturing ERP vendor quoted me $18,000 to $30,000 a year, six weeks into building our own system. The median Canadian food manufacturer turns over $327,000. That quote is five to nine per cent of their entire revenue, for the licence alone.

The failure in this category is not that the expensive end is too expensive for the average manufacturer. It's that the affordable end is nearly invisible, so the decision looks like a choice between a spreadsheet and a four-or-five-figure commitment. It is not.