I Loved TradeGecko. So I Built VNDLY.

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you know exactly what TradeGecko was. Maybe you used it. Maybe you loved it. Maybe you're still a little angry that it's gone.

I am too.

The Tool That Just Worked

Back in the early 2020s, I ran a product company I ran. We designed and sold physical products — the kind of business where you need to track what's in stock, what's on order, what's been shipped, and what's running low.

We tried a few systems. Most of them felt like they were built by people who had never actually run a product business. Too complex. Too many clicks. Too many features that nobody asked for.

Then we found TradeGecko.

It was different. The interface was clean. Setting up products, creating purchase orders, tracking inventory across locations — it all just worked. No training manuals needed. No consultants required. You could onboard a new team member in an afternoon.

For a small team like ours, that simplicity was everything. We didn't need an ERP. We needed a tool that respected our time.

Then Intuit Happened

In 2020, Intuit acquired TradeGecko. At first, the community was cautiously optimistic. Maybe QuickBooks' resources would make TradeGecko even better?

That's not what happened.

Intuit rebranded TradeGecko to "QuickBooks Commerce" and started folding it into their ecosystem. In 2022, they shut down the standalone product for everyone outside the US. US users were pushed into a QuickBooks Online bundle — a completely different product with a completely different philosophy.

Over 10,000 businesses were left without the tool they'd built their operations around.

I was one of them. By then I'd sold the company, but the experience stuck with me. The best inventory tool I'd ever used had been killed by a company that didn't understand what made it special.

The Gap Nobody Filled

After TradeGecko died, I looked at the alternatives. I tried the usual suspects — Cin7, inFlow, Unleashed, Katana. They're all decent products, but none of them captured what made TradeGecko great:

The sweet spot that TradeGecko occupied was empty. And that bothered me enough to do something about it.

Building What Should Have Come Next

In late 2024, I started building VNDLY. The mission was clear: build the tool that TradeGecko would have become if it had kept evolving on its own terms. Same philosophy — simple, fast, opinionated — but with modern capabilities that didn't exist when TG was built.

What We Kept From TradeGecko's DNA

What We Added That TG Never Had

TradeGecko vs VNDLY — Feature Comparison

From the Founder

I'll be honest: I'm not a professional developer. I'm a product person and entrepreneur who got frustrated enough to build something. VNDLY was built with AI-assisted development, and I think that's actually a strength — it means the product was designed by someone who uses inventory software daily, not by someone who builds software for a living and guesses at what users need.

Every feature in VNDLY exists because I needed it myself or because a real user asked for it. There's no feature bloat. No "enterprise roadmap" that adds complexity nobody wanted.

If you were a TradeGecko user, VNDLY will feel familiar. The philosophy is the same. The execution is modern. And unlike Intuit, I'm not going to acquire it, rebrand it, and shut it down.