How much does Cin7 Core cost to implement?
Most people searching for this want one number but there are three.
There's the subscription you pay to Cin7 every month. There's the cost of getting it set up. And there's time: how long the implementation actually takes, how long before your team is genuinely confident in the system, and how long before you start seeing a return on what you spent.
The money side is the part people research. The time side is the part that catches people out.
This post covers all three:
1. The Subscription
2. The Setup
3. The Time
1. The subscription cost
This one's clear-cut. Cin7 Core has three tiers. Here's what each costs and what's in the box.
Standard
USD $349/month
5x users
2x app integrations
Up to 6,000 sales orders a year.
A solid starting point for a small product business that's outgrown spreadsheets and needs a proper inventory system. Connecting to Xero or QBO doesn’t count towards your integration quota.
Pro
USD $599/month
10 users
4 integrations
24,000 sales orders a year
With MRP (material requirements planning) included, this is where most of our clients land. It covers the full breadth of what a growing product business needs without paying for Advanced-tier features they won't use.
Advanced
USD $999/month
15 users
6 integrations
120,000 sales orders a year
Includes Advanced WMS, unlimited RMA management, and workflow automation, all in the base price. Built for businesses with real complexity: multiple warehouses, high order volumes, or manufacturing at scale.
All subscription pricing is in USD and is based on Cin7's published list pricing as of mid-2026. Always verify against Cin7's current pricing before finalising any budget.
Pay annually instead of monthly and you get one month free. On Pro, that's around USD $660 that stays in your pocket every year, which is worth doing once you have gone live with the system and worked out all the kinks. Until then, month-to-month gives you easier flexibility to add users and modules while you’re figuring out the correct config.
The add-ons that change the total.
The base tier covers a lot, but there are add-ons worth knowing about if you're building a project budget.
Advanced WMS: USD $149/month on Pro (included on Advanced). If you're running a warehouse with multiple locations, pick paths, or anything beyond a simple pick-and-ship setup, you'll want this.
Advanced Manufacturing: USD $149/month on both Pro and Advanced. If you're doing multi-level production with detailed bill of materials costing, this is the module.
Automation: USD $79/month on Standard and Pro (included on Advanced). Sets up workflow rules like auto-generating purchase orders or firing fulfilment notifications.
B2B portal: USD $119/month for the first site, USD $49/month for additional sites (Pro and Advanced only). Needed if you're selling wholesale through a dedicated customer ordering portal.
Retail POS: USD $79/month for the first register, USD $39/month for each additional one (Pro and Advanced only).
Additional integrations: USD $99/month per integration above your tier's included count.
Additional users: USD $99 per group of three, above your tier's base user count.
ForesightAI (demand forecasting): USD $299 to $1,899/month, depending on your annual GMV. This one only makes sense at a certain scale.
To give a concrete example, a Pro subscriber who adds Advanced WMS, Automation, and a B2B portal is looking at USD $946/month. Still less than Advanced, and they're only paying for what they actually need.
Okay, now you’ve sorted your software costs out, how much to set it up? It depends…
2. The setup cost
This is what "it depends" actually means. The things that move the setup cost up or down are always the same, regardless of the client:
The complexity of your processes. A business with a clean buy-and-sell model is a different project from one running multi-level manufacturing, managing batch and expiry tracking, or selling across multiple channels at the same time. More complexity means more configuration, more testing, and more places where things can go sideways.
Integrations. Every connected app adds scope: your accounting platform, your ecommerce store, a 3PL, EDI connections. Integrations need to be mapped, tested, and occasionally coaxed into behaving. One straightforward connection is fine. Four integrations, some of which flow data in both directions, take real time to get right.
The state of your existing data. More on this below, but this is consistently underestimated by most businesses.
Team size. Training ten people who have never seen the system is a different job to walking through the setup with a two-person team who've already watched walkthrough videos.
Onboarding vs Implementation
They are not the same thing.
Onboarding is the process of learning a system and getting your team familiar with its interface after completing an initial setup.
Implementation is the process of configuring a system to your actual business requirements: your workflows, your integrations, your rules, your data architecture. The two overlap here and there, but they're not interchangeable, and the difference matters when you're deciding which route to take.
There are two distinct paths. Here's what each actually involves.
A note on currencies: Cin7's fees are priced in USD, while Waypoint's implementation fees are quoted in AUD. Both are shown in their respective currencies throughout this article.
Cin7's Focused Onboarding:
USD $2,000
Cin7's Focused Onboarding is exactly what the name says: an onboarding service. It is designed to get your team familiar with Cin7 Core and walk you through an initial setup. It is not a full implementation of the system to your business requirements.
That distinction matters a lot, and the scope of Cin7’s package reflects it. Over 8-10 weeks, with one or two one-hour live sessions per week, the Cin7 team guides you through the core modules: inventory, purchasing, sales, accounting integration, and up to two external integrations. They assist with some initial account configuration and will help you import the data your team has prepared. The guidance is structured, the sessions are recorded, and a library of Academy video courses runs alongside everything.
Businesses running Advanced Manufacturing and other more advanced Cin7 Core add-ons, numerous third-party integrations, or operating across multiple channels with any real complexity, fall expressly outside the scope of the service and will more than likely be referred to a partner anyway.
For a new or small business with a straightforward setup, this can be a reasonable entry point at a fair price. Your team still does the heavy lifting: preparing the data, configuring the system, completing the Academy courses, managing the internal training cascade, but you're not entirely without support. The caveat is that "going live" at the end of Focused Onboarding is a starting line, not a finishing line. You'll have a working system. How well it fits your business, and how confident your team is in it, is something that develops over the weeks and months that follow.
We call fairly regularly from businesses that went through Focused Onboarding, hit something they weren't expecting, and need someone to come in and work out what was built, what needs fixing, or what needs redoing from scratch. That work costs money. It isn't always more than a partner would have charged from the start.
It's just never less.
Working with an experienced implementation partner like us:
AUD $7,000 to $28,000+
A partner-led project is an implementation service. The partner configures the system to your actual workflows, takes the lead on data migration, manages the integrations end-to-end, and provides training built around your specific setup rather than a generic curriculum. You get someone who understands the business implications of the decisions being made in the system, who can tell you whether the way you're thinking about your warehouse process is going to cause problems at scale or whether your approach to multi-currency is going to complicate your month-end.
The AUD $7,000 end of the range covers small, lower-complexity projects, and it also covers clients who want an agile approach: get live as quickly as possible on the fundamentals, accept that some things will be refined in the weeks after go-live, and treat that first live milestone as the beginning of the next phase rather than the end of the project. The work that occurs after go-live will be a separate engagement, with additional costs that you’ll need to budget for.
At this scale, whether you've gone through Focused Onboarding or a lean partner implementation, go-live is a moment of progress, not a moment of completion. Systems mature over time, and the best ones are shaped by what you learn once real transactions start flowing.
An implementation in the range of AUD $25,000 to $28,000+ reflects a business with a lot of complexity: multiple channels, advanced manufacturing, high order volumes, and several integrations that all need to talk to each other reliably.
And then there’s everything in the middle, the AUD $18,000 to $25,000, which a lot of established businesses fall into.
One important clarification: even with a partner, data migration is not something the partner owns entirely. The partner leads and provides expert guidance, but a significant portion of the work still sits on the client side. More on that below.
Discovery/Scoping
Whatever you call it, have a budget for it.
On top of the fees we quoted above, if you go with an implementation partner, you should have a budget for figuring out the scope of the implementation and identifying risks. We call this scoping process “Discovery.” Other partners may call it something else. Regardless of the label and who performs it, it should deliver the following:
A draft scope of what is/isn’t included in your implementation.
A register of risks, workarounds, and other caveats you need to be aware of, and how they’ll impact the project.
Finalised implementation fees.
You should budget ~AUD $2,000-$4,000. It will take place (and be billed) before anything else takes place. This figure will often double for the more complex businesses with deep manufacturing processes that need to be mapped out.
We run Discovery and scope every project before we implement it. And we include a data assessment to give you a clear picture of how big a job it’ll be to bring your products and BOMs into Cin7 Core.
If you want a rough figure before moving into the Discovery process, get in touch and we'll have an initial call to give you an honest estimate.
Data migration
Remember when I said everyone underestimates this part?
I've been doing this for over a decade. Migrating Product, Customer and Supplier data is the part of every project that surprises people, and not in the fun way that involves cake.
In Cin7's Focused Onboarding, data migration is a task your team owns from start to finish. Cin7 will support the actual import of the data you've prepared, but the extraction, cleaning, and formatting are on you. If the data comes in wrong, fixing it is also on you.
In a partner-led implementation, the partner takes the lead. But "takes the lead" is not the same as "handles it." The partner brings the expertise to guide the process, define what ‘good’ looks like, and manage the import. What the partner cannot do is make decisions only you can make: they can't tell you which products in your database you don't actually sell any more, or which supplier records don’t need to come over, or which stock locations are still in use. That knowledge lives with your team.
If a partner has to sift through years of legacy data themselves to find missing metadata, fill in product classifications, or reconcile duplicates, that work takes time and costs money. Because data migration varies so much in scope and condition from one client to the next, some partners bill for it as time-and-materials , others may charge a fixed fee. The more work your data needs before it can be imported, the higher that bill.
It’s not just product businesses who can underestimate how big a job this is, either. We’ve been around long enough to have heard the stories of partners who low-balled the data migration cost, then hit the customer with scope variation fees when it was a bigger job than they anticipated. As I mentioned earlier, we will review your data integrity as a part of our Discovery process to determine how big a job it’s going to be. This allows us to clearly define your scope, help you decide who will make it Cin7 Core-ready, and price your project accordingly. Without surprises.
The data you have is almost never in the shape Cin7 Core needs it. Duplicate SKUs under slightly different names. Supplier records for companies that stopped trading years ago. Stock values that nobody has actually trusted since the last stocktake, whenever that was. None of this is unusual. It's just what happens when a business grows faster than its systems, and the day-to-day keeps lowering the data problem in the growing list of priorities.
What affects the data migration scope and cost:
How clean your existing data is.
Whether you're migrating from one system or several.
How many years of active records you need to bring across.
How much product metadata is incomplete, inconsistent, or missing.
Most implementations bring across the current product catalogue, active supplier and customer records, and clean opening stock. The work is less about moving data and more about making data fit to move.
The single biggest thing you can do to control migration costs is to clean your data before the project starts. Not glamorous work, but it pays for itself every time.
Training
Your team needs to know your Cin7 Core.
In Cin7's Focused Onboarding, training is the primary deliverable. It accounts for roughly 90% of the billable time in the package. The sessions are live, they follow a structured programme, and they're tailored to your business needs within that structure. Alongside the weekly sessions, you're expected to supplement with at least an hour a day of Cin7 Academy learning throughout the entire engagement. Your internal Champion is responsible for completing the courses and cascading the relevant modules to the right team members by role.
It's a reasonable amount of structured learning. The limitation is that it's still generic training, built around how the system works. Your team learns Cin7 Core. They don't necessarily learn your Cin7 Core, because there are decisions still being made about how your specific setup will work, and those decisions shape everything.
In a partner implementation, training is built around your configuration. Your team learns your specific workflows, your document templates, your approval rules, your integration setup. When something unexpected happens on day three of go-live, the person your warehouse manager calls is someone who actually built the thing they're looking at.
What training needs to cover regardless of approach:
Core workflows for each role (warehouse, purchasing, sales, accounts)
How your specific configuration works rather than how the system works in general
What to do when something goes wrong (and in the first few weeks, something always does)
Where to find things in the system so the team isn't firing off support tickets for every question
Training scope depends on how many people you're bringing up to speed and how complex the workflows are. It's rarely where the bulk of the implementation cost sits, but it's the part people are most tempted to cut short. Don't. The cost of undoing mistakes made by an under-trained team is reliably higher than the cost of training them properly in the first place.
3. Time
The number that's hardest to put in a budget. You can put a dollar figure on the subscription and a dollar figure on the implementation. Time is harder to quantify, but it's just as real a cost. Here's what each dimension of it actually looks like.
How long does it take to go live?
A simple, single-phase partner implementation typically runs 6-10 weeks. A medium to complex project can span 3-6 months. Cin7's Focused Onboarding is designed to run over 8-10 weeks, though the actual pace depends on how much your team can commit to each week alongside their regular workload.
The point at which you go live isn't a fixed milestone; it's a business decision. Some clients want every workflow tested, every integration verified, and every user trained before they flip the switch. Others prefer to go live on core workflows and work out the rest in a live environment. Neither is wrong. The first approach reduces risk but extends the pre-live period. The second gets you into production faster but requires more tolerance for figuring things out as you go. Your risk profile and your internal deadline pressure are what determine which route makes sense.
How long until your team actually knows what they're doing?
Nobody expects to be a confident driver the day they pass their test. Somehow, everyone expects to be confident in a new business system from week one.
But there's an important distinction to draw here, and it applies directly to the choice between Focused Onboarding and a partner implementation. There are two levels of system knowledge.
The first is what you could call ‘Builder proficiency’: understanding the system deeply enough to configure it, make good structural decisions in it, and diagnose problems from first principles.
The second is ‘Operator proficiency’: knowing your role well enough to do your job in the system confidently day to day.
Focused Onboarding, by design, asks your team to develop both simultaneously. You're configuring the system and learning to use it at the same time, whilst still running your business. That's a significant cognitive load, on top of which you're also responsible for the data preparation and the internal training cascade. Some teams handle it well. Others find themselves collapsing into a pool of tears eight weeks in, with a system that's been set up in a way that doesn't quite fit how the business actually runs, because the people configuring it didn't yet have enough experience in the system to know what they’re doing.
A partner-led implementation separates these two levels cleanly. The partner brings the Builder proficiency. Your team only needs to develop Operator proficiency, which is a much smaller ask. The learning curve is still real in either case, but its shape is very different depending on how much of it you're carrying.
When does it pay off?
Anyone who quotes you an ROI figure before understanding your business is either estimating from industry whitepapers or trying to close a sale. ROI from an inventory system is subjective, depending greatly on your specific inputs, not an industry average dressed up as a promise.
The simplest ROI measurement is only applicable when you're moving from a more expensive platform. If your current system costs more than Cin7 Core would, the subscription savings are immediate and straightforward to calculate.
For most businesses, the ROI they want to see is measured in operational efficiency: fewer hours spent on manual tasks, fewer stockouts, fewer order errors, better purchasing decisions from actually knowing what's in the warehouse. Cin7 have built an ROI calculator that estimates potential savings based on your specific inputs around manual work, stockouts, and pick-pack errors. It's a useful tool for getting a directional sense of the numbers. Their figures are based on industry averages, so treat them as a starting point rather than a projection.
The thing that affects ROI more than most people expect is the speed of adoption. Every week your team is hesitant in the new system, working around it, or doing things manually because they're not confident enough to trust it, is a week you're not getting the efficiency gains you invested in. The fastest route to ROI is a team that gets genuinely confident as quickly as possible. That's not an argument for cutting corners on training, but rather an argument for investing in it properly.
Add it all up, Here's what you're looking at
The subscription is predictable. The setup cost is the variable. And time is the thing that changes the shape of both. Here's what realistic budgets look like across three types of business. Cin7's subscription is billed in USD; Waypoint's implementation fees are in AUD.
-
Subscription: Standard or Pro at USD $349-$599/month, maybe one add-on.
Setup: Focused Onboarding at USD $2,000 if you have the internal resource to drive it, or a partner project with AUD $2,000-$3,000 set aside for Discovery, and AUD $7,000-$12,000 for a lean, go-live-fast project. But make sure to budget for iterative work after go-live.
Timeline: 6-10 weeks either way, though a partner project is more predictable.
-
Subscription: Pro tier with two or three add-ons at USD $750-$950/month.
Setup: partner-led implementation with AUD $2,000-$3,000 for Discovery, and in the AUD $12,000-$20,000 for the project.
Timeline: 2-4 months to go live, with most of the team at solid operating proficiency within weeks of that.
-
Subscription: Advanced tier, potentially with Advanced Manufacturing on top, at USD $1,000-$1,200/month.
Setup: partner-led implementation with AUD $2,000-$4,000 for Discovery, and a AUD $20,000-$30,000+ project, depending on scope.
Timeline: 4-6 months to a full go-live, with proficiency building progressively as each phase goes live.
These are reference ranges, not formal quotes. The subscription numbers are exact; the implementation figures and timelines reflect the kind of scope those business profiles typically involve.
We've been doing this since 2013. An initial call takes up to an hour and gives you enough to put a reasonable number in your budget. Getting that down to a confirmed, scoped figure happens in the conversations after that, once we understand your business properly.
If you're at that stage, book a call below, and we'll give you a straight answer.
Meet with Waypoint
Waypoint are Cin7 Core specialists based in Melbourne and London. We help inventory businesses, from startups to established manufacturers, get the most out of their systems.
More Blog Posts Like This
