Carbon6 Review (2026)
By Daan Haket · Researched and written with an AI assistant · who does what
The honest headline here is not pricing but ownership — and it has moved again, this time in the reader's favour.
Amazon sellers who want reimbursements, advertising, inventory and sourcing tools from one vendor and are content to buy them tool by tool — the suite trades under the Carbon6 brand again since 30 Jun 2026, so there is a named counterparty on the contract.
you want one flat subscription and one invoice: this is a suite priced per tool, each with its own contract, and the pieces have moved between owners twice since Feb 2025 — check which entity your existing agreement actually names before you add another one.
Transparency: we earn nothing from Carbon6; the links to it are plain links. How we make money →
Pricing (2026)
✓ Pricing re-verified 10 Oct 2026
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| ScanUnlimited Limited | $0/mo | 1 file upload a month, 10,000 products per upload |
| ScanUnlimited Unlimited | $70/mo | unlimited uploads, 100,000 products per file — $60/mo on the annual plan ($720/yr) |
| SoStocked Inventory + Profit | from $175/mo | inventory forecasting plus profit planning, free trial |
| Seller Investigators | 25% commission | charged only after Amazon deposits the recovered funds; free 48-hour audit |
| PixelMe, DSP Prime, PPC Entourage | not published | quoted by sales |
“Starting at $175 per month”Source: sostocked.com/pricing, read 23 Oct 2026
What we can verify on the vendor’s own pages today (re-checked 10 Oct 2026; unchanged since 26 Aug 2026): carbon6.io/pricing now redirects to the tool list, so there is no suite-level price at all. SoStocked has dropped its two-tier ladder — where on 21 Jul it listed ProfitFlow at $97/mo and ProfitFlow + Inventory at "starting at" $250/mo, it now shows a single Inventory + Profit plan at "starting at" $175/mo with a free trial.
ScanUnlimited lists a free Limited tier and Unlimited at $70/mo, or $60/mo on the annual plan ($720/yr, marketed as two months free); the Unlimited Plus tier that sat above it at $1,080/yr is no longer on the pricing page. The off-Amazon advertising tool is listed as PixelMe by Carbon6 again rather than SPS Ad Performance, and it publishes no price. The 3P FBA-reimbursement service is a contingency arrangement: Seller Investigators by Carbon6 states a 25% commission charged only after Amazon has deposited the recovered funds, stated twice on its own site (re-read 26 Aug 2026), after a free 48-hour audit with no obligation.
Our older suite-level figures — entry tools from about $49/mo, PixelMe from about $500/mo with a 6-month minimum, and $300-500+/mo for a working stack — stay withdrawn: none of those is verifiable against a live authoritative source today. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.
Category context: Operations & Workflow. Across the 53 tools in this category that we researched with a public US-dollar price, the median entry price is $29 a month (lowest paid plan as listed, per seat where the vendor prices per seat). Compare pricing conditions in the Software Cost Atlas →
The honest knock
SPS Commerce bought Carbon6 for roughly $210M on 7 Feb 2025 and retired the brand into spscommerce.com. On 30 Jun 2026 it sold the entire 3P (Amazon marketplace seller) revenue-recovery business for $9.5M cash, booking an estimated $20M loss, and named no buyer at the time. There is a name now. The partner-programme notice we received on 17 Aug 2026, from Carbon6's own partnerships contact, states that SPS transferred ownership of the 3P business to Carbon6 and that commission terms and payouts are unchanged.
It also states that existing links were redirected to the Carbon6 tool sites on 14 Aug 2026, and that the programme itself rebrands from SPS to Carbon6 on 24 Aug 2026. Reading carbon6.io on 17 Aug 2026 matches that: the whole suite is on sale there again as "by Carbon6". Read the two purchase numbers carefully, because they are not the same thing. The $210M bought the whole Carbon6 stack; the $9.5M was the 3P arm alone, and offloading it at a book loss seventeen months in still tells you how it performed.
What remains undisclosed is who stands behind the Carbon6 entity itself, so the question is answered one level down and no further. Two more things to hold. Reuters reported on 23 Jun 2026 that SPS hired Morgan Stanley to explore a sale of itself under activist pressure, with talks early and no deal assured. And the 1P side is no longer a clean split, because SPS kept the deduction-recovery business it bought while Carbon6's own site now lists ChargeGuard for Amazon 1P vendor recovery.
Ask which entity your 1P work would sit with before you sign. For 3P reimbursements the July advice has expired — you can name the counterparty on your contract again.
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What Carbon6 does
A suite of Amazon seller tools sold per product rather than as one subscription: Seller Investigators (FBA reimbursement recovery), ChargeGuard (1P vendor recovery for chargeback fees, shortages and accruals), PixelMe, DSP Prime and PPC Entourage (advertising), SoStocked (demand and inventory planning), ScanUnlimited (wholesale sourcing), plus ManageByStats, D8aDriven, AMZAlert and SellerAssist. Ownership matters here: SPS Commerce bought Carbon6 in Feb 2025 and folded the 1P deduction-recovery work into spscommerce.com, then transferred the 3P Amazon-seller business to Carbon6 on 30 Jun 2026 — the suite is sold under the Carbon6 brand again, with the partner programme rebranding from SPS to Carbon6 on 24 Aug 2026 and commission terms unchanged.
What buyers report about Carbon6
Hands-on: not tested by usReported by buyers: G2, Capterra and Amazon-seller comparisons, read August 2026
Themes from the buyer-review sites listed at the foot of this page, read in August 2026. We have not run Carbon6 ourselves, so this is other buyers' experience rather than ours. We summarise it here because the complaints are usually the part a vendor page leaves out.
- • It consolidates tools sellers otherwise buy separately — SoStocked, PixelMe, ManageByStats and others under one roof. Around 4.3 on G2 across roughly 23 reviews.
- • SPS Commerce acquired it for $210M in February 2025, so there is real corporate backing behind it.
- • The FBA reimbursement commission is 25%, against 18% at Refully and 10% at TrueOps. On recovered money that difference is large.
- • Amazon's 31 March 2025 policy change moved reimbursements from sale price to manufacturing cost, which shrinks what any provider can recover. The case for this category is weaker than it was in 2024.
- • Pricing is confusing across the suite — several tools, several tiers, no clean total.
- • The acquisition fragmented the brand: carbon6.io redirects to spscommerce.com and pricing became more opaque.
- • The ad tools are decent but not as deep as Perpetua or Pacvue.
When the paid plan is worth it
Carbon6 is not one subscription, so there is no single premium tier to weigh — carbon6.io/pricing redirects to the tool list (read 26 Aug 2026). The only tool in the suite with a real free-versus-paid decision is ScanUnlimited. Its free Limited plan is capped at one file upload per month and 10,000 products per upload, and that cap is what bites first. A supplier catalogue often runs past 10,000 lines, and once you have spent your single upload you cannot re-scan the same list when the supplier reprices.
If you evaluate one modest list a month, stay on free. If you work several suppliers, or re-scan as costs move, Unlimited — $70 a month, or $60 on the annual plan at $720 a year — lifts you to unlimited uploads and 100,000 products per file. That is the whole ladder now: the Unlimited Plus tier is off the pricing page. What upgrading does not fix: you are still buying one tool.
SoStocked bills separately and its page shows a single Inventory + Profit plan from $175 a month, and the advertising tools quote separately again. Paying for ScanUnlimited buys scan volume, not the suite.
How to actually use Carbon6
The shortest route to a usable result runs through ScanUnlimited. Create an account, connect an Amazon marketplace under Settings and the Amazon Credentials tab, then click New Scan and upload a supplier list. You choose the product identifier type (UPC, EAN, ASIN, ISBN or keyword), map the identifier and cost columns, pick a marketplace, and the scan returns matched listings.
Where this section comes from: our research notes (100 words)
ScanUnlimited help-centre articles (Adding Your First Amazon Marketplace, Upload a File, How to Format a File), the ScanUnlimited pricing page, the SPS Commerce product pages for ScanUnlimited and SoStocked, and the Carbon6 product pages for PixelMe and PPC Entourage Re-verified 10 October 2026: scanunlimited.com/pricing, sostocked.com/pricing (Inventory + Profit from $175 a month, unchanged), carbon6.io/pricing (still redirects to the tool list), sellerinvestigators.com (25% commission after payout, unchanged) and the ScanUnlimited help centre at carbon6.io/scanunlimited-help: 'What Types of Plans Do We Offer?', 'Downgrade Your UNLIMITED Subscription', 'Adding Your First Amazon Marketplace' and 'Amazon SP-API is Replacing MWS', all read 10 October 2026.
Common Carbon6 setup mistakes
Where Carbon6 setups actually go wrong, and what it costs you when they do. Same sources as the setup notes above — not from a walkthrough we ran ourselves.
Where it goes wrong is the file and the connection.
- Only CSV, XLS and XLSX are accepted, and in a workbook only the first sheet is read, so a hidden or second sheet quietly produces the wrong scan.
- Cost values must be in US number format.
- Long product IDs saved to CSV from a spreadsheet turn into scientific notation and stop matching.
- Keyword scans are capped at 10,000 lines, and a scan can display 8 custom columns.
- On the connection side, a newly created seller account can show as invalid; the documentation says to wait 24 hours before resubmitting, and it still walks you through the retired MWS token flow rather than the current API.
The natural comparison is Helium 10 or GETIDA — Helium 10 is the flat-priced seller suite with published tiers, and GETIDA is the independent FBA-reimbursement specialist. Against a suite that has changed hands twice in eighteen months, both still win on continuity. The owner question itself is no longer open, though: the 3P business trades as Carbon6 again since 30 Jun 2026, on unchanged commission terms.
Frequently asked questions
Why do Carbon6 pages show two different ScanUnlimited prices?
Both figures are on Carbon6 pages. According to the pricing page (scanunlimited.com/pricing, read 10 October 2026), Unlimited is $70 a month, or $60 a month on the annual plan, marketed as two months free, which is $720 a year. According to the help-centre article 'What Types of Plans Do We Offer?' (carbon6.io/scanunlimited-help, read 10 October 2026), it is still $60 a month with an annual plan of $600 a year. Treat the pricing page as the current offer and the help article as older. The downgrade article adds that you lose legacy pricing eligibility when you downgrade, so an older rate does not come back after a pause.
What happens to my scans if I drop back to the free plan?
The help article 'Downgrade Your UNLIMITED Subscription' (read 10 October 2026) says you keep access to your previous scans after downgrading. The pricing FAQ says the downgrade takes effect at the end of your billing cycle, and the help article says completing it is the user's own responsibility. After that you are back to one file upload a month of up to 10,000 lines, with a Power-Up preview limited to 10 items a month.
Do I need an Amazon seller account to use it?
Yes. The ScanUnlimited pricing FAQ (read 10 October 2026) says you need an Amazon Professional Seller account, because the tool queries Amazon's product API with your credentials. The setup article 'Adding Your First Amazon Marketplace' still describes pasting a Seller ID and MWS Auth Token, while a separate help article says every seller must reconnect through the newer SP-API under Settings. A newly created seller account can show as invalid; the setup article says to wait 24 hours before trying again.
Is this a hands-on review of Carbon6?
This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test — where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is good and bad at, and we have no affiliate relationship with Carbon6 — we earn nothing whether you sign up or not.
- Buyer reviews on G2, Capterra and Amazon-seller comparisons, read August 2026.
- Carbon6’s own published pricing page.
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