Congratulations on launching! Just curious, why open source vs making a free plan?
founder here. i see open source as a better API for connecting it to other systems
Readit Newsbarbinbrad commented on Show HN: I've been building an ERP for manufacturing for the last 3 years github.com/crbnos/carbon... · Posted by u/barbinbrad
Did you folks roll this yourself? I like the learning platform and was trying to figure out what you've might have used to build it.
thanks, here's the code for it: https://github.com/crbnos/carbon/tree/main/apps/academy
Interesting, since the past two manufacturers I have worked for in the last 16 years both have Sage as their primary ERP...BUT that directly resulted in them needing a bunch of other software strapped to the side of it to get things done, which sounds exactly like the problem Carbon was made to solve.
I had even taken it upon myself to develop a (very rudimentary, but functional) piece of software to manage the Service Department of my current employer, since RMAs/Repairs were still being handled with paper and email when I arrived a few years ago, Sage apparently lacking a suitable module as well as the looming shadow of "that's the way we've always done it" thinking.
Carbon looks like it would trim a lot of the thorns my current employer gets hung up on, but it would take some serious convincing to migrate over given the entrenchment of old and comfortable habits, inefficient though they may be.
Anyway, thanks for the response, I know you folks are busy.
i appreciate you talking through it with me! i only have my limited experiences, and the term ERP is pretty fuzzy -- a CFO's view is a lot different than a head of production.
a sage integration is actually at the top of our roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/crbnos/projects/1/views/1
We try to hit the cache as much as possible, and all fetching is done in parallel with Remix. We try to make heavy use of their defer function to only block on the most important data, and await the other data. Remix has the option to merge all parallel requests into a single fetch, but it didn't work for us because we use a hybrid strategy for hosting (where the most common pages are served from v8 edge functions and the less common stuff is served by node functions). The reason we don't put everything (basically) into the edge runtime is because vercel only gives you 2MB of code in the edge runtime before you have to pay HUGE money. But I've definitely put a lot of thought into the performance, so I hope it's great.
I'm surprised the carousel is slow, it's just framer motion. https://github.com/crbnos/www/blob/24d2b59150fc21e6b9c9df3b4...
EDIT: i'm going to remove the framer motion -- you're right. it's not helping. i've also got to optimize these images, but that's for another day.
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?
We try to hit the cache as much as possible, and all fetching is done in parallel with Remix. We try to make heavy use of their defer function to only block on the most important data, and await the other data. Remix has the option to merge all parallel requests into a single fetch, but it didn't work for us because we use a hybrid strategy for hosting (where the most common pages are served from v8 edge functions and the less common stuff is served by node functions). The reason we don't put everything (basically) into the edge runtime is because vercel only gives you 2MB of code in the edge runtime before you have to pay HUGE money. But I've definitely put a lot of thought into the performance, so I hope it's great.
I'm surprised the carousel is slow, it's just framer motion. https://github.com/crbnos/www/blob/24d2b59150fc21e6b9c9df3b4...
While we're on the topic of ERP:
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.
founder here. i often advise people to use excel (or some web-based). it's excellent software, and often the simplest way to solve a problem. it just gets untenable as the company gets bigger.
Is this a kind of developer BINGO? ;-)
"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!
imo, these (supabase, trigger, upstash, novu) are the best hosted solutions in the world, but they are all self-hostable/apache/MIT.
the easiest one to replace is upstash -- the @io/redis is super easy to switch out -- i think the APIs are the same. but the others encapsulate an insane amount of complexity. my thinking is, if i -- as a fairly competent software engineer -- don't have the bandwidth to sysadmin 10 services -- how is someone whose running a manufacturing going to have the bandwidth.
the setup does suck, but imo it's the best solution for bang-for-the-buck long-term. interested to hear your thoughts!
Good questions. I'd like to add some, if you don't mind.
How does it stack up against Sage?
Expanding on "what is the deployment situation," how long should it be expected to take for full conversion to the Carbon platform from the described situation of discordant software that has been entrenched in a particular business's practice for decades?
hey guys -- founder here.
here's a little bit about me, and why i decided to build this: https://carbon.ms/#memo
re: sage, i'd say that sage is well-known as being a great general purpose accounting software for multi-location, and multi-entity businesses. but i don't know of many manufacturers running on sage.
re: erpnext, also great. i love their open source model, their developer ecosystem, and great documentation. i'd say the major difference is the data model and the UI that it begets. in erpnext, i think everything is a "doctype" where with carbon things are more bespoke. each ui has it's own specific tables, and specific ui
re: erp
TLDR Brad: I’d suggest you look at any customers with potential scale, who should have a custom SKU/BOM/order mix. 3D printing and full custom made to order products will have this mix, and it gets increasing painful when scaling past 100s of orders per month. One will find there will be in-house systems and workaround to deal with this complication, which should be fixed decently once a company is in the 1000s of orders per month by necessity of survival.
A bit more background as there is various bits of advice in these threads, and I will provide my take with scaling such a startup. Third-Party ERPs from the big vendors are purchased by Finance and are needed for validation pre-IPO and into the IPO (no one is going to trust something else without proof of success in publicly traded companies and it will be a red flag if there is no use cases in reputable publicly traded companies). ERPs are financial focused (like EHRs in healthcare), and their vendors will happily upsell the other addons like MES/BOMs, which are fine for generic manufacturing with limited SKUs. However in a world of customized/personalized SKUs, traditional ERP/finances solutions cannot be easily used to run manufacturing operations. I’d recommend focusing on integrating into ERPs (tack on custom IDs to the related objects) and automating them rather than building the full financial accounting/taxes into the platform. For example, your platform will still track the BOM details, but the totals will get synced for overall financial reporting for the various ledgers and not all the sub-assemblies which the ledgers don’t care about. This keeps the MES purpose built (and the big vendor ERP keeping simple books) and the ultimate source of truth what’s happening on the floor without getting into the accounting details that matter for tax optimization and not manufacturing operations.
really well said, imo! it's interesting how there's two views of ERP. one is a G/L + anything needed to support it. and the other is more of a tool that supports operations and planning. i started with a G/L, but have kept it hidden even now, because my thought it that everything else should be good first, and support the G/L second.