41 real questions from teams evaluating Granel, grouped into 6 blocks: product, pricing, onboarding, security, integrations and company. Cannot find yours? Write to us.
Product · 7 questions
What Granel is, what it does, how it differs from an ERP or a spreadsheet, and who it is built for.
Granel is CTRM (Commodity Trading & Risk Management) software for physical commodity trading teams. It brings the whole life of a deal into one place: pricing, counterparties, contracts, logistics, itemised costs, multi-currency P&L, cashflow and document compliance. It replaces the mix of spreadsheets, emails and notes most small teams run on.
Trading boutiques, agricultural and nut traders, desks inside a larger group, and brokers. The sweet spot is teams of 2 to 20 people trading physical commodities who have outgrown what a spreadsheet can safely do but do not want a six-figure corporate CTRM.
Deal management with cost lines, per-deal P&L, multi-currency using the ECB daily reference rate, consolidated 30/60/90-day cashflow, documents attached to each deal (B/L, invoices, certificates), CSV and Excel export and, on Growth and Enterprise, anomaly alerts. There is also a public per-deal P&L calculator, so you can test the logic without signing up.
An ERP is horizontal: accounting, HR, inventory and finance for any company. A CTRM is vertical for trading: it understands physical contracts, incoterms, logistics costs, FX exposure and per-deal P&L. The two coexist: Granel exports to CSV and Excel on every plan and offers a read-only API on Growth and Enterprise. The CTRM vs ERP comparison goes into detail.
When the signs show up: formula errors that keep coming back, no up-to-date view of P&L, several people overwriting the same file, cost lines forgotten or double-counted, and no single view of cashflow at 30/60/90 days. The CTRM vs Excel comparison goes through them one by one.
Yes. The interface is responsive and designed for checking deals, alerts and cashflow from a phone or tablet. Heavy data work — imports, bulk edits — is more comfortable on a desktop.
Yes, with six currencies: EUR, USD, GBP, BRL, ARS and COP. A single deal can carry cost lines in different currencies and stores the exchange rate applied; P&L and cashflow are reported in your organisation’s base currency. EUR, USD, GBP and BRL use the ECB daily reference rate, updated once a day (it is not a real-time rate). The ECB does not publish ARS or COP: those rates depend on an additional provider. If you trade in another currency, ask us before you sign up.
Pricing · 9 questions
What Granel costs, what each plan includes, how billing works and what happens if you change plan or cancel.
Three plans: Launch at €149/month (up to 3 users), Growth at €399/month (up to 10 users) and custom Enterprise, with 15% off if you pay yearly. All of them include unlimited deals, multi-currency and migration support.
Launch covers the essentials: unlimited deals, P&L and cashflow dashboard, multi-currency, documents attached to each deal, team roles and email support. Growth adds anomaly alerts, custom fields, the read-only API, a larger AI capture quota and priority support. Enterprise has unlimited users; an SLA, integrations with your ERP, SSO and any custom deployment are agreed under contract. The pricing comparison table has the detail.
Billing is monthly or yearly, in euros, invoiced by Thinktier OÜ from Estonia. The yearly cycle is 15% cheaper and charged once, up front: €1,520 a year on Launch and €4,070 a year on Growth. Payment is by card through Stripe, and only the organisation’s owner manages billing. Enterprise is agreed separately.
There is no cancellation fee. The monthly cycle has no lock-in either: cancel whenever you like and the service stays active until the end of the month you paid for. The yearly cycle is charged up front and, as clause 7 of the Terms sets out, invoiced periods are not refunded: if you cancel, the service stays active until the end of the contracted year. Enterprise agreements may include an annual commitment by contract.
Yes, from the billing settings. A change, up or down, takes effect immediately. When you move up, the price difference for the current period is charged straight away; when you move down, it is prorated on the next invoice. When you move down, features the new plan does not include (alerts, custom fields, API) stop being available that same day; your data is not deleted. Switching between the monthly and yearly cycle restarts the cycle and is invoiced straight away, crediting what you have not used.
Yes: 14 days from the moment you create your organisation, with Growth features and no card required. What costs money per use is capped: 25 AI extractions for the whole trial, one capture channel and no API keys. When it ends the account goes read-only: nothing is deleted, you can still view and export your data, and you can pick a plan whenever you are ready. If you only want to check the maths, the per-deal P&L calculator is public and needs no sign-up.
The limit counts active users plus pending invitations: 3 on Launch and 10 on Growth. Once you reach it, no more invitations can be sent until you move up a plan or free a seat by deactivating a user or cancelling an invitation. Extra seats are not sold individually: above 10 users, the plan is Enterprise.
No. Published prices exclude VAT. At checkout you are asked for your billing address and, if you have one, your VAT number; VAT is applied on the invoice where it is due.
Yes, per organisation and per month: 50 on Launch, 300 on Growth and 2,000 on Enterprise, more under contract. During the trial there are 25 in total, and they do not renew. Once you hit the limit the message is still saved so you can complete it by hand: nothing is lost, only the automatic extraction pauses until next month or until you move up a plan. Usage is shown in the capture inbox and in Settings › Billing.
Onboarding · 7 questions
How long it takes to go live, how historical data is imported and what support the Granel team provides.
The target is 2 to 3 days, depending on how much history you bring and how complex your setup is: products, counterparties, routes and base currency.
Yes. Start with new deals on day one and upload your history in batches whenever you are ready. The Granel team helps with field mapping during onboarding.
With the CSV/Excel importer: you map the columns in your file to the deal fields (customer, supplier, product, quantities, buy and sell prices, dates…) and every batch is validated before it is committed. Customers, suppliers and products that do not exist yet can be created automatically. With one row per deal, cost lines are not imported: you complete them afterwards on each deal. If your history lives in a projections Excel with one deal sheet per deal, the importer reads each sheet with its cost lines and shows its margin next to Granel's before importing.
Migration never touches your spreadsheet or your current system: it works on copies. You can keep running both in parallel until you have signed off your first month-end in Granel.
No. Onboarding is designed for trading and operations people, not IT. If you do have an internal technical team, they can connect their own tools through the read-only API included in Growth and Enterprise.
Launch includes email support with business-hours response times. Growth and Enterprise get a named contact for onboarding and a 14-day review to tune configuration, alerts and reports.
Yes. There is onboarding material inside the app — tooltips, templates, short videos — and, on plans with priority support, training sessions built around your own workflows.
Security · 8 questions
Where your data lives, how it is protected, who can reach it and how European regulation is met.
In a Postgres database managed by Supabase; the application is served from Vercel. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and Thinktier OÜ staff access is limited to what is needed. If you use AI capture, the message text is sent for extraction to Groq, Inc. (USA) or to Google. Which providers are involved, which transfers leave the EEA and under what safeguards is set out in the privacy policy.
Thinktier OÜ is an Estonian company (Reg. 17249293, VAT EE102949399) subject to the GDPR. For the personal data your organisation keeps in Granel, such as your counterparties’ contacts, Thinktier OÜ acts as processor. The data processing agreement (DPA) is published as a draft, pending legal review, and sub-processors are listed in the privacy policy.
Only the users your organisation explicitly invites. Isolation is enforced per organisation with Row Level Security in the database: no user from another organisation can read or write your data, not even by mistake.
Yes, on every plan, with four roles. The owner is the only one who manages billing and changes roles. Admins invite and deactivate users, configure the organisation and can delete deals, counterparties and documents. Traders create and edit deals, counterparties, contracts, payments and documents, and can export. The viewer role reads without editing or exporting. Roles limit what each person can do, not what they can see: today every member, viewers included, can see buy prices and margins on their organisation’s deals.
Data is hosted on Supabase (PostgreSQL) and database backups are managed by that provider. Granel does not currently offer on-demand backups or per-customer configurable retention. You can export your deals, cost lines and counterparties to CSV/Excel at any time.
All traffic to the platform goes over HTTPS/TLS and data at rest is encrypted at disk level by the database provider. Passwords are stored hashed and API keys with SHA-256. The secrets of the capture channels (Telegram and WhatsApp bots) never reach the browser and are read only by the service, but they are not encrypted at application level.
If you cancel or stop paying, the account goes read-only: nothing is deleted and you can still export deals, cost lines, counterparties and products to CSV/Excel. Attached documents are downloaded from each deal. How long each category of data is kept is set out in the retention table in the privacy policy.
Yes. Any user can turn on 2FA with an authenticator app (TOTP) from their security settings. Today it is optional: it cannot be enforced across the organisation, and there is no single sign-on (SSO via SAML or OIDC). If your security policy requires it, we can scope it under contract on Enterprise.
Integrations · 3 questions
How Granel connects to your ERP, accounting, BI tools and the rest of the systems you already run.
It is built to sit alongside brokers, forwarders and finance teams. Today it captures messages over WhatsApp Business and Telegram with AI extraction, exports to CSV and Excel from the interface on every plan, and offers a read-only API (v1) on Growth and Enterprise. A custom integration with your ERP or accounting system is scoped under contract on Enterprise.
Yes, in two ways. On every plan you can export to CSV or Excel from the interface and load it into your BI tool — Metabase, Looker, Power BI, Tableau. On Growth and Enterprise, the v1 API also lets you read deals, counterparties and exchange rates with an API key, without exporting by hand.
It depends on the scope. Reading data through the v1 API needs no development on our side: you just create an API key on Growth or Enterprise. API keys are read-only today and there are no scheduled exports, so a two-way ERP integration is scoped case by case on Enterprise, with the timeline set in the proposal.
Company · 7 questions
Who is behind Granel, how to reach the team and which support channels come with each plan.
Granel is a product of Thinktier OÜ, an Estonian company (Lõõtsa tn 5, 11415 Tallinn), Reg. 17249293, VAT EE102949399. The team combines physical commodity trading and product engineering backgrounds.
For sales questions, demos or evaluations, use the contact page. For customer support, use the in-app panel or email the contact assigned during onboarding.
European hours (CET), Monday to Friday. On Enterprise, coverage and response times are agreed in the contract.
Yes. A 30-minute session on your own cases — your routes, currencies and usual cost lines — rather than a generic tour. Book it from the contact page.
Yes. Raíz Andina is the first customer in production and other teams are evaluating.
We share the quarterly roadmap with active customers and a summary on the product pages. Priorities shift with real feedback from the people using the platform daily.
Yes. Customer requests outweigh any internal roadmap: if a feature unblocks your operation and fits the product, it gets prioritised.
Question not listed?