Why we charge the brand and not the factory
We built the first version of this for co-packers. Then we watched who actually had the problem.
The first version of this product was built for contract manufacturers. It was called LineCap, which literally meant production line plus capacity, and every screen in it was designed for someone standing in a factory looking at a schedule.
It was a reasonable guess and it was wrong. Manufacturers already have systems. They are not elegant, and a scheduler will happily complain about them, but they work well enough that nobody is losing sleep over them. The person losing sleep is the brand, who cannot see the schedule at all, does not know what the next run will cost until the invoice arrives, and finds out about a delay from a customer.
So we flipped it. The brand is the customer now, and the manufacturer gets a free login — not a trial, not a limited seat, free permanently. That sounds generous and it is not: a planning tool that only one side of a two-sided problem uses is a spreadsheet with extra steps. The value only appears when both companies work from the same copy.
The rename followed the same logic. "Line capacity" is the factory’s vocabulary. A founder does not think about line capacity, they think about whether there is enough stock to reach Christmas and what the next batch will cost. NextBatch names the question they are actually asking.