As a UX person, this is the type of stuff I love to see posted here. So many people don't understand how atrocious the UX is in non-sexy career tracks such as manufacturing. One question I have is how users have reacted to your leftmost nav bar. 13 icons is a lot, do you show them all at one time, or do they dynamically appear based on the user role of the person who's logged in at the time?
First off, congrats, this is no small feat, well done.
A question: in my (limited) experience, ERPs are made on the basis of integrations. I'd have thought the best priority order would be data-model first, integration second, everything else third. How do you think about this? What's the goal here?
And secondly, some feedback: It looks like Carbon falls into the same trap as many self-hostable SaaS-like products (including my own!), and that is that software designed for one single hoster is often more complex to deploy and built in a different way, whereas software designed primarily to self-host looks much simpler. As an example, installing Wordpress or Odoo is relatively simple, with basic frontend webserver config and easy to run open source databases. Carbon on the other hand appears to be quite a few different components, with many dependencies, some of which are SaaS products, and uses a database (Supabase) which is itself a whole microservice ecosystem that is a considerable effort to deploy. What's the strategy here? Despite having the skills for it, I'm not sure I'd ever consider self-hosting Carbon, and maybe that's good for Carbon as a business, but it's also less good for the ecosystem.
We built a lot of the custom ERP related systems outside of our ERP. Leaving the financials to the big boys and just talk to the ERP. It's working really well.
Congrats on the launch! Love seeing modern manufacturing systems.
Do you handle supplier master data management? We're seeing procurement teams struggle with duplicate vendors in their ERPs - same supplier gets entered 5 different ways, messes up spend analytics and supplier relationships.
We're building AI agents for business data cleanup (still in stealth, docs coming). Manufacturing/supply chain customers seem to have the messiest supplier data - way worse than other industries.
Curious if this is something you're thinking about for Carbon? (CTO here, happy to chat)
Do you have any users yet? What’s your target size manufacturing company? I’ve been in the industrial software space for a while, and at least for large MFG, you only see the major players, with SAP being the most common. There is this “UNS” concept that’s been around for 5ish years now and has caught steam (unified namespace, google and you’ll find it). It has holes from a technical standpoint, but it will get attention if you can show how it works with factory data in a UNS. Happy to help if i can. I work at a company that does industrial dataops now, focused on getting shop floor data in/out of the factory with context.
The modular ERP/MES/QMS approach is interesting and challenges traditional manufacturing processes. Most manufacturers obsess over single source of truth. (I.e. ensuring a part number means exactly the same thing across planning, production, and quality systems.) On the one hand, breaking these into separate apps creates potential data consistency risks. On the other hand, it could enable much better adoption. Start with MES for shop floor visibility then add QMS for compliance later rather than massive all-in-one ERP implementations that often fail. Curious, how are you handling data consistency across modules? What's been the feedback from your current or potential customers on this approach versus traditional monolithic ERP systems?
I’m the owner of a smallish furniture manufacturer. About 15 employees. I built out the order management system myself because nothing really fit our process.
After looking at the site I can’t really say I know how this software could help us. I’ll look at it later on my desktop but first I think some better demo videos or gifs on the landing page would be nice.
When I worked in manufacturing we had an ERP system that was awful, and we ended up supplementing it with Excel spreadsheets and an Access database. I briefly started writing my own ERP system to replace the whole system, but I realized something: my ERP system would be hopelessly tied to our process at this company, and wouldn't be usable by the manufacturer down the street, which my buddy worked at, without extensive rewriting. Software of this kind has a tension between being general-purpose and being really good for one specific workflow.
Maybe ERP is one of those things that co-evolves with the company, shaping the company as much as it's shaped by the company.
I'll bite. I am a ERP consultant in the SMB manufacturing and distribution space. Primarily we operate on Acumatica, Sage and Netsuite.
The most important thing about ERP systems is - customization. IE: Scripting (netsuite), or even core programming (Sage100 for example). Not just user defined fields but workflows and being able to override and hook into core parts of the system. Say you want to override your cost basis for a certain productline or maybe serve different prices based on the shipping warehouse.
How do you approach that?
EDIT:
How do you handle the finances, G/L auditing, and allt hat financial wizardy?
customers.. they love PDFs. How do you handle generating things like pick lists, invoice sheets, etc? templating?
EDIT2:
One thing big ERPs provide is basically a cohesive way to extend. Not just an API in a RESTFUL sense, it's more akin to an IDE or like GTK+, there's almost everything rolled in for extension inside the 'world view' of the ERP. Every ERP makes some decisions and the rest of the world may flow, be that how you issue credit memos, handle multiple financial entities (do they all have the same chart of accounts? do they all have the same modules? Are there shared users) and so forth. How do you approach that? IE: when you need to slap something like PO's on top of AP, so basically AP + Items and a whole bunch more, does that "flow"? Do you receive those goods and they end up in your inventory for AR? etc.... Having an extensible system is great for addons and consulting, but the bigger piece is - for you, letting your ERP grow and add capabilities.
EDIT3: "Stripe" is not a billing techstack. Mostly CFOs make decisions about billing options, not us lowly tech monkies. Do you support pluggable vaults or anything akin?
What exactly is an “ERP”? Virtually everything I read about them or on the website of products, is so vague and broad that it sounds like “it’s everything”. How would a business know they need this product? For the big ERPs out there, is there a clear guide with screenshots that show what they concretely do?
Congrats on this! Quite interesting for me as I have been working on vertical ERPs for a while, not at all related to manufacturing and as far as I know, accounting is usually the core of any ERP. Who is your ICP at companies in your target groups - ops managers? I’ve mostly seen CFOs being the drivers behind ERP purchasing.
Hm, interesting. With how slow the testimonial carousel on the web page is though, I don't have much confidence that Carbon is performant either. How many pieces of that (frankly massive) techstack require dedicated network trips?
This is all cool but i think traditional erp systems are going to get eaten away by software like Optifye.ai, using vision for counting, and then certifying through manual data entry. If there’s no Vision integrated into your erp, you’ll get eaten away by competitors who run faster lean teams through using such systesm
I am setting up a large manufacturing operation now.
Red flags with your site are: (a) seems to assume a sales order based process; (b) seems to assume B2C sales via Stripe; (c) has a huge bunch of layers but no actual user view.
I would suggest beginning your page with "Assumptions". In there, list all the things you have assumed.
Then I would suggest having a section for each area: ERP, MES, whatever, with a screenshot or two and a quick table based comparison vs. other tools.
Finally, include something about the layers you used and what they do. Nobody really cares about that stuff, it's almost developer documentation rather than user documentation.
I have noticed that, in 2025, many small businesses still use Excel. Is there an underserved market? Or simply a "tarpit idea" (deceptively attractive but actually unscalable, time-consuming)
I asked 5 friends who are business owners and 5 who are working for SMEs. None of them use "apps". The best they use is accounting app.
40 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 65.9 ms ] threadA question: in my (limited) experience, ERPs are made on the basis of integrations. I'd have thought the best priority order would be data-model first, integration second, everything else third. How do you think about this? What's the goal here?
And secondly, some feedback: It looks like Carbon falls into the same trap as many self-hostable SaaS-like products (including my own!), and that is that software designed for one single hoster is often more complex to deploy and built in a different way, whereas software designed primarily to self-host looks much simpler. As an example, installing Wordpress or Odoo is relatively simple, with basic frontend webserver config and easy to run open source databases. Carbon on the other hand appears to be quite a few different components, with many dependencies, some of which are SaaS products, and uses a database (Supabase) which is itself a whole microservice ecosystem that is a considerable effort to deploy. What's the strategy here? Despite having the skills for it, I'm not sure I'd ever consider self-hosting Carbon, and maybe that's good for Carbon as a business, but it's also less good for the ecosystem.
Do you handle supplier master data management? We're seeing procurement teams struggle with duplicate vendors in their ERPs - same supplier gets entered 5 different ways, messes up spend analytics and supplier relationships.
We're building AI agents for business data cleanup (still in stealth, docs coming). Manufacturing/supply chain customers seem to have the messiest supplier data - way worse than other industries.
Curious if this is something you're thinking about for Carbon? (CTO here, happy to chat)
After looking at the site I can’t really say I know how this software could help us. I’ll look at it later on my desktop but first I think some better demo videos or gifs on the landing page would be nice.
Maybe ERP is one of those things that co-evolves with the company, shaping the company as much as it's shaped by the company.
I would have thought "manufacturing" was too generic and that you would need different software for each industry and so on.
But instead it looks like it doesn't matter if you're making shoes or cars or umbrellas or computer chips, everything uses the same software?
The most important thing about ERP systems is - customization. IE: Scripting (netsuite), or even core programming (Sage100 for example). Not just user defined fields but workflows and being able to override and hook into core parts of the system. Say you want to override your cost basis for a certain productline or maybe serve different prices based on the shipping warehouse.
How do you approach that?
EDIT:
How do you handle the finances, G/L auditing, and allt hat financial wizardy?
customers.. they love PDFs. How do you handle generating things like pick lists, invoice sheets, etc? templating?
EDIT2:
One thing big ERPs provide is basically a cohesive way to extend. Not just an API in a RESTFUL sense, it's more akin to an IDE or like GTK+, there's almost everything rolled in for extension inside the 'world view' of the ERP. Every ERP makes some decisions and the rest of the world may flow, be that how you issue credit memos, handle multiple financial entities (do they all have the same chart of accounts? do they all have the same modules? Are there shared users) and so forth. How do you approach that? IE: when you need to slap something like PO's on top of AP, so basically AP + Items and a whole bunch more, does that "flow"? Do you receive those goods and they end up in your inventory for AR? etc.... Having an extensible system is great for addons and consulting, but the bigger piece is - for you, letting your ERP grow and add capabilities.
EDIT3: "Stripe" is not a billing techstack. Mostly CFOs make decisions about billing options, not us lowly tech monkies. Do you support pluggable vaults or anything akin?
Red flags with your site are: (a) seems to assume a sales order based process; (b) seems to assume B2C sales via Stripe; (c) has a huge bunch of layers but no actual user view.
I would suggest beginning your page with "Assumptions". In there, list all the things you have assumed.
Then I would suggest having a section for each area: ERP, MES, whatever, with a screenshot or two and a quick table based comparison vs. other tools.
Finally, include something about the layers you used and what they do. Nobody really cares about that stuff, it's almost developer documentation rather than user documentation.
"Techstack Remix – framework Typescript – language Tailwind – styling Radix UI - behavior Supabase - database Supabase – auth Upstash - cache Trigger - jobs Resend – email Novu – notifications Vercel – hosting Stripe - billing"
And no joke: congrats to your product!
I have noticed that, in 2025, many small businesses still use Excel. Is there an underserved market? Or simply a "tarpit idea" (deceptively attractive but actually unscalable, time-consuming)
I asked 5 friends who are business owners and 5 who are working for SMEs. None of them use "apps". The best they use is accounting app.
- Who is 'I'?
- How do you see continuity if something were to happen to you?
- How does it stack up against ERPNext?
- Why did you decide to build an ERP system from the ground up?
- What is the deployment situation?