Why we built a free ERP (and what we're doing about the business model)

We built Celerp because that's a terrible situation and it doesn't need to be this way.

The problem with existing ERP software

Enterprise software is designed to be purchased by procurement committees, implemented by consultants, and administered by full-time IT staff. The price reflects this. Sage, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP - these aren't products for a 10-person jewelry business or a small wholesale distributor. They're institutional software sold to institutions.

The "small business" tier - QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks - solves a narrow slice of the problem. They're great accounting tools. They're not inventory systems. They're not CRM. They're not purchasing workflows. You end up stitching together three or four tools with manual CSV exports and a lot of copy-paste.

Every business we talked to had the same workflow: inventory in one spreadsheet, invoicing in QuickBooks, customer notes in a notebook, and a lot of phone calls to double-check stock before promising delivery.

Why free?

Because the value of an ERP to a small business owner is the data they put into it - and once a business has years of inventory history, customer records, and financial data locked in a tool, they're not leaving easily. That's the vendor lock-in model, and it's extractive.

We believe the right model is: give away the tool, charge for the services that require infrastructure. Celerp runs on your machine. Your data lives in a Postgres database you control. The software is source-available - you can read every line of code, fork it, or self-host it forever without paying us anything.

Because it's built on a Code Elastic Layer, the architecture is open for anyone to extend. Build your own modules, or browse a marketplace of modules built by other businesses. The same API works from the UI, the CLI, or your own code.

We make money from optional Connect services: connector relay (bridging your local Celerp to Shopify, QuickBooks, or Xero), encrypted backup (encrypted off-site copies of your database), and AI (natural language queries and actions against your own data). All three are opt-in. None of them change what the core product does.

What we're most excited about

A Mac Mini costs $599. Download Celerp, plug it into your office network, and you have a full ERP system for your whole team. Inventory, invoicing, accounting, manufacturing - all running on a box the size of a stack of CDs.

Your team opens their browsers and connects. No per-user fees. No Connect subscription. No data leaving your office.

Or run it on any machine you already have. A spare laptop, an old desktop, a $5 VPS. Developers can install it with pip install celerp.

The exciting part isn't the software. It's that a 5-person business can have the same operational backbone as a company spending $50,000/year on NetSuite - and pay nothing for the software.

What's built

Celerp ships as a modular system - install only what your business needs, extend it with additional modules. The core modules today:

• Inventory: items, variants, stock tracking, locations, attachments, bulk CSV import
• Documents: invoices, purchase orders, quotes, credit notes, delivery notes, customer memos - with auto-generated double-entry journal entries
• CRM: contacts, deals, memos, tags, activity notes
• Accounting: double-entry ledger, chart of accounts, journal entries, P&L, balance sheet
• Manufacturing: bills of materials, production runs, input consumption tracking
• Document sharing: p2p share links, "Accept & Import" flow, no relay required

On top of the core, the optional remote access adds:

• Connectors: Shopify, QuickBooks, and Xero sync - inventory, orders, and financial data flow automatically between your tools
• Encrypted backup: scheduled encrypted pg_dump uploads, configurable retention, one-click restore
• AI assistant: natural language queries and actions against your live data - ask "what's my gross margin on SKU-441 this quarter" and get a direct answer, not a dashboard to navigate
• Web access: connect your local instance to a subdomain on relay.celerp.com so your team can access it from anywhere without VPN or port-forwarding

Everything is API-first. Every action you can take in the UI can be performed via the REST API - which is also what makes the AI integration work without any special-casing. The AI calls the same endpoints you do.

It's backed by 3,100+ tests and has been running in production at multiple businesses.

Multilingual from day one

Celerp ships in 11 languages: English, Thai, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Vietnamese, Japanese, German, Italian, Indonesian, and Arabic. The UI language follows your company settings. Documents print in your company's language. No per-seat language licenses.

This matters because the businesses that need a free, honest ERP aren't all in the US. A 12-person furniture wholesaler in Jakarta has the same problem as one in Bangkok or Guadalajara.

What's next

1. Shopify App Store listing - inbound discovery from millions of merchants
2. Electron app with bundled Postgres - no terminal, no Docker, just download and double-click
3. Marketplace v0 - build your own modules and extensions to meet your custom needs. Because Celerp is source-available with open-source MIT modules and written in Python, any developer can create modules without learning a proprietary framework. The API is the same whether you're calling it from the UI, the CLI, or your own code.

If you're a small business owner managing physical inventory, give Celerp a try. It's free, it runs on your machine, and it takes about 5 minutes to get from "download" to "first invoice sent."

If you have feedback - especially if you find something that doesn't fit your workflow - email hello@celerp.com. We're building this for the businesses using it.