Grain Merchandising Software: Build Custom or Buy AGRIS and Eka
The threshold is how many places your position comes from. If it is one system, buy.
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The threshold is how many places your position comes from. If it is one system, buy. A single location elevator originating from a couple of hundred farms with simple contract types should stay on AGRIS, which has handled tickets, discounts and settlements for decades at a fraction of a build. If your position is assembled daily from more than two sources, or you carry exposure across more than two commodities or crop years, build the position engine at $95,000 to $190,000. Large international houses with cross border logistics should buy Eka or Agiblocks rather than reproducing years of work.
When is off the shelf genuinely the right call here?
The products in this business are legitimate and it is worth saying which fits whom. AGRIS has run grain accounting at co-ops and elevators for a very long time and knows what a scale ticket, a discount schedule and a settlement are. Eka is a serious enterprise commodity trading and risk platform. Agiblocks is well built for soft commodity trading houses. None of them is bad. Their centres of gravity simply sit in different places.
Buy AGRIS or a comparable grain accounting package if most of these are true:
- One location, originating from a couple of hundred farms.
- Cash and forward contracts, with at most one deferred structure.
- One or two commodities inside a single crop year.
- Hedging is light enough that the broker statement reconciles in an afternoon.
- Your merchandiser is not maintaining a position spreadsheet alongside the system.
Buy Eka or Agiblocks instead if you are a large international trading house with complex cross border logistics. The logistics depth in those products alone would consume a build budget, and reproducing it is a poor use of capital.
There is a third answer that is neither. Hold off entirely if your contract structures are not written down and your discount schedule lives in three people's judgement. Custom software encodes whatever process you actually have, including the undocumented parts, and you will pay twice: once to build it and again to fix it after the first season shows what the rules really were. Spend a fortnight writing the contract catalogue first. It costs nothing and it is the highest return work available in this category.
When does a custom build actually pay off?
Mid sized origination and merchandising firms fall between the elevator systems and the trading platforms, which is why they run one of each plus a spreadsheet, and why that spreadsheet ends up holding the position. Build when two or more of these are true.
- The position is assembled from more than two sources. Contract file in one system, hedges in a spreadsheet updated from broker fills, unapplied deferred price bushels in a second spreadsheet, an inventory number from the scale house that is a day behind, and a judgement call about committed bins. Forty minutes of assembly produces a number that is right to within perhaps twenty thousand bushels, and in a market that moved eighteen cents that uncertainty is real money.
- Contract structures your system cannot hold. Deferred and delayed price accruing service charges, hedge to arrive with roll rights, basis contracts, minimum price contracts with an embedded option. Each behaves differently in the position, the accounting and the risk report.
- More than two commodities, or exposure spanning crop years. Crop year spanning changes how the ledger has to slice, and it is not something you retrofit cheaply.
- More than roughly 300 farms where settlement quality affects volume. The settlement statement is one of the few documents a producer reads carefully, and clarity and speed there influence next year's bushels regardless of how good your bid was.
- One person is the only reason the position is right. Everyone knows it, and no board would accept that risk if it were stated out loud.
How do they compare on the things that matter in this industry?
Contract as a process rather than a price. This is the test to run in any demonstration. Ask a vendor to model a contract half priced against a stated futures month with the basis still open, then roll it. If the answer is a price field and a note, your side spreadsheets will outlive whatever you buy, because those spreadsheets exist precisely because the primary system stores a price where a process belongs.
Position derived rather than maintained. Ask what happens when a ticket is corrected three days later. In a balance based design that correction is a manual adjustment somebody has to remember. In an event based design it is a new event with a clean audit trail, and the position moves on its own.
Discount schedule discipline. Applying a schedule is a genuine strength of the elevator packages. What is usually absent is any comparison of discounts actually collected against what the schedule implies, by location and by employee, with a reason captured on every override. Margin leaks in small increments across thousands of tickets and no standard report shows it.
Broker reconciliation. Monthly manual matching lets a missed fill or an unrecorded roll sit for weeks while your position quietly disagrees with the broker's. Automatic matching with an exception list is the difference between a phone call and a research project.
Data portability. Contract and position history is commercially sensitive and often subject to audit. Ask exactly what leaves the system, in what format, and how quickly.
What does total cost of ownership look like at your scale?
From Digital Heroes delivery experience, a first release covering the contract model with a pricing state machine, scale ticket application, futures and options hedge records, and a live position by commodity and futures month runs $95,000 to $190,000 over 14 to 20 weeks. A full platform adding broker statement reconciliation, quality discount schedules with grade capture, freight and logistics, storage and service charge accrual, producer settlement and a producer portal runs $240,000 to $560,000 across 9 to 15 months. A regional originator with three elevators, a river terminal, four commodities and roughly 700 farms, with barge logistics deliberately excluded, lands near $516,000 including contingency across about twelve months.
The components that move the number most. Rail and barge logistics at $45,000 to $110,000, which is the largest optional item and a separate domain with its own counterparties. The producer portal at $30,000 to $60,000. Discount schedules with grade capture at $28,000 to $55,000. Scale house and probe integration at $22,000 to $48,000, which is industrial work rather than web work and sits at the top of that range when sites have different indicator models. Market data integration at $15,000 to $35,000 plus licensing, which is a commercial negotiation with a lead time rather than a build line.
Then the annual costs. Support and maintenance at 18 to 25 percent of build. Discount schedule updates at $5,000 to $12,000 a crop year, each needing effective dating rather than an overwrite. Scale house hardware maintenance at $6,000 to $15,000, because indicators, printers and probe interfaces live in dust and vibration. Broker file format changes at $4,000 to $10,000, since reconciliation is the first thing to fail when a statement layout moves. And market data licensing, priced per user and per feed, which is the recurring line firms most often underestimate because it scales with how many desks get a screen.
What does the hybrid look like, and when is it the honest answer?
For most firms in this bracket the hybrid is the answer, because a build usually does not replace your grain accounting package. It sits alongside it.
Keep the accounting where it is and integrate at $20,000 to $42,000 rather than rebuilding a general ledger. Then build the parts that are genuinely yours, in this order:
- The contract model and the position engine, together. Roughly $99,000 of a first release, and they cannot be separated because the position is derived from contract state rather than bolted on afterwards. This is where the money is and everything else in the category is a report on top of it.
- Ticket application and hedge records. The two feeds that make the position real rather than theoretical.
- Discount schedules and grade capture. Versioned with effective dates, applied automatically, with overrides requiring a person and a reason.
Defer three things without harm. Rail and barge logistics, because every firm that builds freight first spends four months on it and still cannot answer what it is long by futures month. The producer portal, which depends on settlement being trustworthy and cannot come first anyway. And a second commodity beyond the two you prove the ledger on, because the engine generalises even though the discovery does not have to happen all at once.
Which should you choose, by operator size and stage?
Find your row and act on it.
- Single location, a couple of hundred farms, simple contracts. Buy AGRIS. A bespoke system at that scale is an expensive route to the same place, and the money is better spent on storage.
- Contract structures undocumented, discount schedule in three people's heads. Buy nothing yet. Write the contract catalogue and the schedule with effective dates. That fortnight changes both the price and the outcome.
- Two to four elevators, two commodities, position assembled from two sources. Keep the accounting package and build the contract model and position engine only, at the bottom of the first release band.
- Regional originator, three or more locations, four commodities, 300 or more farms. Build the platform, phased across roughly a year, with logistics deliberately out of the first twelve months.
- Large international house with cross border logistics. Buy Eka or Agiblocks. The logistics depth alone would consume your budget.
Two conditions apply to every build row. Start the market data licensing conversation in week one rather than week twenty, because it is a commercial negotiation with its own lead time that engineering cannot compress. And keep a manual entry fallback at the scale house permanently available: it costs almost nothing to build and it is the difference between a slow morning and a closed scale.
One check is worth running before you commit anything. Compare discounts actually collected against your schedule for one location for one season. In our delivery experience that comparison usually surfaces a long standing workaround at one site rather than dishonesty, and the size of what it finds is the best available guide to whether the project pays back.
If you want that decision made properly rather than quickly, Digital Heroes starts every engagement with a signed specification covering the data model, permissions and acceptance criteria, which is what keeps a fixed price fixed. The document is yours whichever way you go.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- Poor software quality cost the US economy an estimated $2.41 trillion in 2022, including roughly $1.52 trillion in accumulated technical debt, driven partly by unsuccessful development projects and low-quality legacy systems. Source: Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ) - Herb Krasner (2022) →
- Inventory carrying cost commonly runs about 20% to 30% of inventory value, covering capital cost, storage/warehousing, insurance, taxes, handling, shrinkage, and obsolescence - a recurring cost that better inventory and warehouse software aims to reduce. Source: APQC (2023) →
- The NRF discontinued its long-running annual shrink report, stating that a broad study of retail shrink 'is no longer sufficient for capturing the key challenges and needs of the industry' - important context that qualifies how POS/shrink benchmarks should be cited going forward. Source: Retail Dive (2024) →
- Across ten outpatient clinics the mean no-show rate was 18.8%, and the marginal cost of no-shows reached $14.58 million per year for those clinics, at roughly $196 per missed appointment (2008 figures). Source: BMC Health Services Research / PubMed Central (Kheirkhah et al.) (2015) →
Frequently asked questions
What does it cost to switch off our current grain accounting system?
In most cases you should not switch it off. The usual architecture keeps the accounting package for the general ledger and builds the merchandising layer alongside, integrating at $20,000 to $42,000, which removes the migration risk entirely.
If you do move, the expensive records are open deferred price balances, unpriced contracts and storage accrual history, all of which have to reconcile to the penny because producers ask about them seasons later. Do the judgement work with your own staff rather than paying a developer to guess.
What happens if AGRIS, Eka or Agiblocks changes its pricing?
None of them publishes pricing, so ask each for a three year total including implementation, then ask two specific questions alongside it. What does a new contract structure cost and how long does it take, because that turnaround is the constraint that put your position in a spreadsheet in the first place. And how are users priced, since merchandising firms tend to want screens on more desks than a licence model expects.
Get the export terms for contract and position history in writing at the same time.
How long before we have a live position instead of a daily assembly?
Fourteen to twenty weeks for a first release covering the contract model, ticket application, hedge records and the position engine. After that the position is a query rather than a report, sliceable by commodity, month, location or contract type.
Two things create schedule risk and neither is code. Market data licensing is a commercial negotiation with a lead time, and documenting the contract structures your firm actually uses, including the variants invented to win a specific account, takes longer than anyone expects. Start both in week one.
Is AGRIS cheaper than building our own merchandising system?
For a single location elevator originating from a couple of hundred farms with simple contract types, comfortably yes, and we say so before quoting. It has handled tickets, discounts and settlements for decades and a build would be an expensive route to the same place.
The comparison changes when your position is assembled daily from more than two sources, or your contract structures live in spreadsheets because the system cannot hold them. Ask what a new contract structure costs and how long it takes, because that is usually the real constraint rather than the licence fee.
Can any system properly handle hedge to arrive and basis contracts?
Yes, if the contract is modelled as a pricing state machine rather than a record with a price field. It should know what is priced and unpriced, which futures month it is attached to, what rolls have happened, what basis is established and what remains open, with every pricing event stored immutably.
That design is what removes the side spreadsheets, because those exist precisely because the main system stores a price where a process belongs. Ask any vendor or developer to model a half priced contract with an open basis before you go further.
What does the producer portal add, and when should we build it?
Thirty thousand to sixty thousand dollars for contracts, unpriced bushels, tickets with grade factors, accruing storage and service charges, and electronic pricing requests with your cutoffs and limits enforced server side.
Build it after settlement, never before. A portal showing an unreliable settlement statement is worse than no portal, because the settlement is one of the few documents a producer reads closely and it directly affects next year's volume.
Should rail and barge logistics be in the first release?
No. It adds $45,000 to $110,000 and it is a separate domain with its own vocabulary and counterparties, which is why most firms run it in a separate system to begin with.
Build the position engine first. Firms that reverse this order spend four months on car allocation, demurrage and terminal scheduling and still cannot answer what they are long by futures month, which was the original problem.
Where does margin actually leak in a merchandising operation?
Most often in quality discounts and shrink applied inconsistently across locations and shifts, with manual overrides nobody reviews. The report that finds the money compares discounts actually collected against the schedule by location and by employee.
Run that comparison for one location for one season before committing to any project. It usually surfaces a long standing workaround rather than dishonesty, and the size of what it finds is the most honest guide you will get to whether a build pays back.
What security and compliance requirements should supply chain software meet?
At minimum: role-based access control, encryption in transit and at rest, audit logs on inventory and order changes, and tested backups, because the system holds supplier pricing and customer purchase history your competitors would love to see. If enterprise customers connect to it, expect security questionnaires and possibly SOC 2 expectations; food, pharma, and aerospace add traceability rules like FDA lot tracking or ITAR data handling. Raise these in the first scoping call, since retrofitting audit trails onto a live system costs far more than designing them in.
Should we start with an MVP or build the full supply chain platform at once?
Start with an MVP that fixes your single most expensive workflow, prove it in daily operations, then expand module by module. That gets working software onto the warehouse floor in about 12 weeks instead of debating a year-long spec, and real usage always reorders the roadmap; features that felt critical in planning routinely get cut after go-live. Digital Heroes typically scopes phase one at 30 to 40 percent of the total vision and lets measured results justify each next phase.
Should I hire a freelancer or an agency for my software project?
A skilled freelancer is the right call for a single-discipline scope under roughly $15,000, like a website, a plugin, or one integration. Above that, projects need design, backend, testing, and project management at once, and a solo builder becomes the single point of failure: if they get sick or take a bigger client, your project simply stops. Agencies bill 20-40% more per hour but carry continuity, code review, and someone to escalate to, which is what you are actually buying.
When is SAP actually a better choice than building custom supply chain software?
Choose SAP when you need a full ERP, operate in a heavily audited industry that expects standard systems, or run global operations where localization, tax, and compliance content matter more than workflow fit. SAP's strength is breadth: finance, manufacturing, and supply chain in one validated suite. Custom wins when your edge lives in a specific workflow, like how you allocate inventory or route orders, that SAP would force you to bend to its standard process. Many Digital Heroes clients keep SAP as the system of record and build custom operational tools around it.
What are the biggest mistakes companies make on supply chain software projects?
The top three: replacing every system at once instead of one workflow at a time, skipping data cleanup so the new system inherits years of bad SKUs and phantom stock, and designing screens without the warehouse staff who will use them daily. A fourth is underscoping integrations and discovering mid-project that the ERP connection is half the work. Digital Heroes sees more supply chain projects fail from scope and data problems than from any technical cause.
Will custom software scale as we add warehouses, SKUs, and order volume?
Yes, if multi-location support and your target volumes are stated requirements at design time, because a schema built for one warehouse is expensive to retrofit for ten. A well-built system on PostgreSQL comfortably handles millions of SKUs and tens of thousands of orders per day on modest cloud hardware, so scaling cost shows up in hosting bills rather than rewrites. Give your agency the 3-year growth picture upfront even if phase one covers a single site.
What does it cost to maintain custom supply chain software each year?
Budget 15 to 20 percent of the original build cost per year, so roughly $9,000 to $12,000 annually on a $60,000 system, covering hosting management, dependency updates, bug fixes, and small enhancements. Across its maintenance contracts, Digital Heroes sees supply chain systems need more upkeep than typical web apps because carrier APIs, EDI specs, and ERP versions keep changing underneath them. Hosting itself is usually minor, often $100 to $500 per month for a mid-size operation.
What should I prepare before contacting a software development agency?
A one-page brief beats a 40-page requirements document: the business problem in plain words, who will use the system, the 5 to 10 workflows it must handle, the tools it must connect to, and your budget range and deadline driver. You do not need wireframes, a specification, or technical vocabulary; producing those is the agency's job during discovery. Stating a budget range up front is the single best move, because it gets you honest scoping instead of a quote engineered to win the meeting.
Can custom software connect to the tools we already use, like QuickBooks, Stripe, and Google Workspace?
Yes, and connecting your existing tools is one of the main reasons to build custom: mainstream platforms like QuickBooks, Stripe, Shopify, and Google Workspace all publish documented APIs. Budget 1 to 3 weeks of work per integration depending on API quality and how much data flows in both directions. Ask any vendor whether they have integrated with your specific tools before, because quirks like QuickBooks' OAuth token handling and API rate limits get learned on someone's project, and it should not be yours.
How much should a small business budget for its first custom app or website?
For a focused first build, most small businesses land between $8,000 and $60,000: roughly $8,000 to $45,000 for a custom website and $25,000 to $60,000 for an internal tool or simple web app, based on Digital Heroes delivery across 2,000+ projects. Customer-facing products with payments, logins, or a mobile app start around $40,000. Quotes far below these bands usually mean a template with your logo on it, not software shaped around your workflow.
How long does it take to build custom supply chain software?
Plan on 10 to 14 weeks for a first production release covering one or two core workflows, and 6 to 9 months for a full platform spanning procurement, inventory, and fulfillment. Digital Heroes ships most supply chain MVPs in about 12 weeks with a 4 to 6 person team. Integrations are the schedule risk: each ERP, EDI, or carrier connection typically adds 2 to 4 weeks of build and testing.
What happens to my software if the agency shuts down or we stop working together?
Nothing dramatic, if the engagement was set up correctly: the code sits in your repository, hosting runs on your cloud account, and a handover document explains how to deploy and operate the system. Any competent replacement team can then take over in days rather than months. If the agency controls the repo, the servers, or the domain, fix that now, because renegotiating access during a dispute is the most expensive place to discover the problem.
Who can build a custom supply chain software system?
Digital Heroes builds custom supply chain software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, with an assigned senior team rather than an account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other supply chain software companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
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