Software for a home embroidery business

Software for a home embroidery business, without the commercial-shop price

A home machine embroidery business needs software that does three things: puts orders from Facebook, Etsy, text, and email on one list, confirms the personalization details before anything is stitched, and tracks who has paid. The established products in this category do all of that and more, but they are built for commercial shops with staff and start at $109 a month. Broidry is built for the one-person shop: it starts free, and the first paid plan is $19 a month.

Orders come through personal channels

A home embroidery business gets orders where its customers already are: Facebook comments, Messenger, text messages, Etsy, and email. The order details live in five apps, and every one of them is also where your personal life happens.

You are the whole staff

Quoting, stitching, invoicing, packing, and answering messages are all the same person. Software built around staff seats, job boards, and approvals between departments is solving problems you do not have, at a price built for payroll.

The margin is in not redoing work

On a $30 personalized piece, one remake from a wrong spelling eats the profit of several orders. The software's real job at home scale is making sure the details are confirmed before the machine runs, and that you get paid first.

What to look for, whatever you pick

These six criteria apply to any product you evaluate, including ours. They come from how home shops actually run, not from a feature checklist.

A price that matches home-shop revenue

A shop doing a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month cannot justify $109 a month for admin software. Look for a free tier or something under $20 that you can outgrow gracefully.

One list for orders from everywhere

The whole point is ending the five-app scavenger hunt. Whatever you pick has to accept an order that started as a Facebook comment as easily as one from Etsy.

Embroidery details as first-class fields

Spelling, font, thread colors by number, placement, and the stitch file. If the software has no place to put those, you will keep a second system anyway and be back where you started.

Customer approval before stitching

A confirmed mockup is the single cheapest insurance in personalized work. The approval should be stored on the order, not buried in a message thread.

Payment tracking that includes Venmo and cash

Home shops get paid in Venmo, cash, checks, and marketplace payouts. Software that only understands its own card processing will not match how your money actually arrives.

No contract

A home business's volume swings with seasons and school years. Month to month, with no cancellation fee, is the only fair term at this scale.

The commercial products, and what they cost

These are good products for the shops they were built for, and a home shop that grows into a staffed shop should look at them again. Prices were read from each vendor's own pricing page in July 2026.

Printavo

Lite is $109 a month, includes two user seats as its minimum, and caps you at 20 quotes or invoices a month combined. Standard is $244 a month. It is a good product for print shops with staff, which is who it is built for.

DecoNetwork

Standard is $239 a month, Premium $339, and Enterprise $439, with a one-time license fee on top whose amount is not published on their pricing page. Built for print shops from small startups through multi-location operations, with web stores and supplier catalogs a home embroidery shop is unlikely to need.

ShopWorks OnSite

No published pricing, seats, or trial terms. They describe OnSite as fitting shops doing $100,000 to $50 million a year. That range answers the home-shop question on its own.

Teesom

The one genuinely free plan in the category: 20 orders a month, single user, with paid plans from $77 a month. It is built for screen printing shops, so the workflow and vocabulary are print-shop workflow and vocabulary, but the free tier is real and deserves a look if free is the requirement.

Stocksmith, formerly Craftybase

An inventory and cost-of-goods tool for makers, from $49 a month, and the one product in this set that says plainly it is for a solo maker or a small team. It tracks material costs rather than orders, so it answers a different question than order management does.

Where Broidry fits

Broidry was built after running exactly this kind of shop: orders arriving through texts, email, Etsy, and Facebook, with no one place that knew what was promised, paid, and due. Your stitch files, thread colors by number, and fonts live in one searchable library. Orders from every channel land on one list with a price, a status, and a due date. The customer approves a preview on your real garment in your real threads before you stitch, and an order reaches the stitching queue when it is paid on the terms you set. The Free plan is $0 a month with the core features included, and it stays free. Maker at $19 a month lifts the order cap. That is the whole ladder until you add a second person.

Common questions

What software do I need to run a home embroidery business?

Three things, and only one of them is optional at the start. Embroidery software for editing and resizing designs usually comes with or alongside your machine. A way to track orders, payments, and due dates, which can be a spreadsheet at low volume and becomes order management software as volume grows. And bookkeeping, which for most home shops starts as a spreadsheet or a simple accounting app. Order management is the piece this page covers.

How much should a home embroidery business spend on order management software?

As little as possible until the orders justify more. Broidry's Free plan is $0 a month, and its Maker plan is $19. Teesom has a free plan capped at 20 orders a month, built for screen printing shops. The commercial products start at $109 a month for Printavo and $239 plus an unpublished license fee for DecoNetwork, prices that make sense for a staffed shop and rarely for a kitchen-table one. All figures were read from each vendor's own pricing page in July 2026.

Can I just use a spreadsheet for my home embroidery orders?

At a few orders a month, yes, and it is the right call. The breaking point comes when the same information has to live in several places at once: what the customer approved, which thread went on the piece, what is due this week, and what you charged last time. We wrote out where spreadsheets break for embroidery shops, honestly including the rows where the spreadsheet wins, in the Broidry versus spreadsheets comparison.

Is Broidry only for home-based shops?

It is built for one person, or two on the Shop plan, whether that is at home or in a small studio. What it is not built for is a staffed production floor. If several employees need to work in the same system, the seat-based products like Printavo and DecoNetwork are designed for that and Broidry is not.

What does Broidry cost?

The Free plan is $0 a month with the core features, a 2% fee on payments taken through Broidry, and 15 orders a month that were paid outside it, such as Venmo, cash, or a check. Maker is $19 a month, drops the fee to 1.5%, and lifts the order cap. Shop is $39 with a second seat and marketing tools. Atelier is $79 for shops running more than one machine. There is no contract and no cancellation fee.

Do I need a business license before I need software?

The paperwork usually comes first, and it varies by state: most home embroidery businesses start as a sole proprietorship or a single-member LLC, register for state sales tax, and check local rules on home-based businesses. Our guide to starting a machine embroidery business walks through that setup alongside the equipment costs.

Start on the free plan and see whether it fits your shop

Broidry is order-management software for machine embroidery shops. Orders from Etsy, Facebook, text, and email land on one list, the customer approves the piece before you stitch it, and you get paid before the machine runs. The Free plan is $0 a month, there's no credit card to start, and there's no contract.