Forecasting that warns early
Burn rate from real movements, plus demand from booked protocol runs, measured against each vendor's actual lead time.
Lot-level · FEFOInventory & purchasing for research labs
Your stock record says you have enough. Next week's experiments disagree.
Aliquot counts what is on the shelf, reads what your booked protocols will consume, and tells you what to order before the freezer runs dry — not after.
Orders are prepared for a human to send. Nothing is transmitted automatically.
DMEM · high glucose · 500 mL
D5796
CONSUMPTION HISTORY
No action
43 days of cover
10 bottles on hand, averaging 0.23 per day over the last 90 days.
BOOKED PROTOCOL RUNS
Order today
Short by 6 bottles
6 runs scheduled in the next 14 days need 16 bottles. Supplier lead time is 12 days.
Every inventory tool shows you the first number. The second one is why an experiment gets cancelled on a Tuesday morning.
- Reorder review
- 25 low items, batched across 8 suppliers
- Counted without asking
- 9 movements logged from one protocol run
- Grant clawback risk
- $107k projected unspent on an R01, 81% elapsed
- Fire-code check
- 8.0 L flammables in a cabinet limited to 4.0 L
The forecast
A burn rate is a rear-view mirror. Your calendar is not.
Move the controls. The bar on the left is what history predicts; the marker is when a reorder would actually arrive. Booked work is what turns a comfortable number into a cancelled experiment.
Runway simulator
live
What history predicts
What the calendar demands
What it does
Six jobs, all fed by the same count.
Inventory that only a diligent person keeps accurate is inventory that drifts. Every feature here writes back to the same lot-level record, so the count stays honest without anyone remembering to log anything.
The last mile of purchasing
Low items batched by supplier to clear free-shipping thresholds, then turned into a requisition, a cart hand-off, or a drafted email.
3 order modesProtocols as bills of materials
Mark a run complete and the reagents come off the shelf at the right volumes. Paste an SOP and the wizard parses the quantities and converts the units.
Auto-decrementFreezer box maps
Every vial has a position. Find the one you need without holding the door open, and see which containers were never filed.
Grid positionsChemical compliance
Incompatible neighbours flagged by hazard class, control-area volumes rolled up the location tree, and a CSV your EHS office will accept.
Fire-code totalsGrant burn-down
Spend against each fund, projected to the end date. Underspending an R01 is as much of a problem as overspending it — and it shows up months earlier.
Per-fundWhere things physically are
A 9×9 box, and the vial you are actually looking for.
Select a position to read its contents. Filled positions carry a lot number and an expiry; the empty ones are where the next vial goes.
Stocked
Last vial
Expired
Empty
−80 °C · Freezer 2 · Rack C · Box 4
Compliance
The inspection finding you would rather write yourself.
Put containers on a shelf and see what an EHS officer would see. Segregation conflicts come from hazard class; the volume total is checked against the control area's configured limit.
Flammables cabinet · Bench B
limit 4.0 L
Findings
Flammable volume in this control area
0.0 L of 4.0 L
Deliberate constraints
The things it will not do, on purpose.
Several of these look like missing features. They are load-bearing. A tool that spends money on its own, or overwrites a number a person is accountable for, is a tool a lab stops trusting after the first mistake.
Automation prepares orders. It never transmits them.
Every path ends at a requisition, a cart, or a draft email waiting for a person. The system never places an order on your behalf.
A quantity a machine read is a draft until a person agrees.
Parsed CSVs, scanned confirmations and imported protocols land as proposals with the source shown, not as silent writes to your stock record.
Fire-code limits are configured, never computed.
Your control-area limits come from your institution's own permits. Guessing them from a hazard table would produce a number nobody can defend.
Approval requires a second person.
The requester cannot approve their own requisition over the threshold. Separation of duties is enforced in the authorization layer, not the UI.
Material matching stays conservative.
A near-match that silently binds the wrong reagent is worse than no match. Ambiguity is surfaced for a human rather than resolved by guesswork.
Pending requests are excluded from fund totals.
A grant balance reflects committed spend. Counting requests nobody has approved yet would make every burn-down chart optimistic fiction.
Verification
What has been driven end to end.
Aliquot is pre-launch and has no customers yet, so there is nothing to quote you. This is the honest substitute: the behaviour that was exercised in a real browser or against a real database, and how.
| Capability | How it was verified |
|---|---|
| FEFO consumption and lot maths | 8 integration tests against a real database |
| One-click order, all three modes | Browser: requisition YL-2026-0002 created, held for approval over the $500 threshold |
| Supplier batching | 25 low items grouped across 8 suppliers with the free-shipping gap shown |
| Protocol run writes back to stock | Browser: DMEM 2→1, DPBS 13→12.98, 9 movements logged, $91.62 of consumption costed |
| Protocol import wizard | Parsed a 6-step SOP, converted units, flagged the one line it could not convert |
| Barcode scanning | Browser: looked up T8787, took one, put it back; USB scanner Enter key handled |
| Messy CSV import | 9 awkward headers matched, including Cat #, Amount, on hand and Price ea. |
| Order confirmation parsing | Thermo tabular and Sigma labelled-block email formats, both extracted in full |
| Chemical segregation | Found HCl beside NaOH, ethanol beside nitric acid, and 8.0 L against a 4.0 L limit |
| Grant burn-down | An NIH R01 at 55% spent and 81% elapsed projected roughly $107k unspent |
| Accessibility controls | High contrast, colour-safe palette, reduced motion and 120% text all applied and persisted |
- Test suite
- 82 passing, across ~19 suites
- Data model
- 23 Prisma models, Postgres-portable
- Bugs caught pre-release
- 7 including a prototype-pollution hole in the permission check
- Tenancy
- Multi workspace scope and permission checked together, never apart
Early access
Bring one freezer and one grant. That is enough to see it work.
Aliquot is onboarding a small number of labs by hand so the first counts are set up correctly. Tell us what you stock and how you buy it.
Pricing
Priced against a grant line, not a seat count.
Plenty of lab inventory is tracked for free, in a spreadsheet or in a tool that came with the building. So the reason to pay has to fit in one sentence: Aliquot tells you what to order before you run out, and keeps the count honest without anyone remembering to log anything.
Pricing
Priced against a grant line, not a seat count.
Most labs already track stock for nothing, in a spreadsheet. So the reason to pay has to fit in one sentence: it tells you what to order before you run out, and it keeps the count honest without anyone logging anything.
$50–150 / month
Payable from a grant's supplies line.
- Lot-level inventory and freezer maps
- Forecasting against booked runs
- Requisitions with approval thresholds
- Grant burn-down per fund
Higher tier
Justifiable by a lab manager without asking the PI.
- Everything in Academic
- Hazard-class segregation checks
- Control-area volumes up the location tree
- Chemical register export for EHS
$300–1,500 / month
Multiple teams, cart-based purchasing.
- Everything in Compliance
- Multiple workspaces and cost centres
- Vendor cart hand-off per supplier
- Protocol libraries shared across teams
Line by line
What each tier includes.
| Capability | Academic | Compliance | Biotech |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lot-level inventory, FEFO consumption | Included | Included | Included |
| Forecasting against booked protocol runs | Included | Included | Included |
| Supplier-batched reordering | Included | Included | Included |
| Requisitions with approval thresholds | Included | Included | Included |
| Freezer box maps and barcode scanning | Included | Included | Included |
| Grant burn-down per fund | Included | Included | Included |
| Hazard-class segregation checks | — | Included | Included |
| Control-area volumes up the location tree | — | Included | Included |
| Chemical register export for EHS | — | Included | Included |
| Multiple workspaces and cost centres | — | — | Included |
| Vendor cart hand-off per supplier | — | — | Included |
| Protocol libraries shared across teams | — | — | Included |
What you are not paying for
Things no tier includes.
Stated here rather than discovered later. Several are deliberate limits, not gaps waiting to be filled — the reasoning is on the product page.
Automatic order transmission
Every path ends at a requisition, a cart, or a draft email waiting for a person. This will not change; it is the design.
True vendor punchout
Supplier links are product and search deep links. Real order submission needs per-vendor partner agreements.
Mailbox reading over OAuth
Forwarding and pasting a confirmation hit the identical parser, so a live mailbox connection is a convenience upgrade.
Regulated-lab validation
No e-signatures or immutable audit records, so Aliquot is not fit for CLIA or ISO 17025 today.
Questions
The ones that decide it.
Why pay for this at all?
A spreadsheet, and most inventory software, records what you have. Neither reads the protocol runs you have booked, so neither can tell you that next week's experiments need more than the shelf holds. That one reading is what this costs money for.
Can this come out of a grant?
The academic tier is priced to sit on a supplies line. The compliance tier is usually paid from a safety budget instead, which a lab manager can authorise without asking the PI.
What happens to our data?
One workspace per lab, with tenancy and permission checked together on every query. There is no billing system yet, so nothing is charged automatically while Aliquot is in early access.
Contact
Tell the developer what this needs to do.
Aliquot is built and maintained by one person. Feature requests, bug reports and access requests all land in the same place, and they shape what gets built next.
Post a request
Private contact
For anything you would rather not post in public — access to your own workspace, pricing for a department, or a security question.
Email the developerThis address goes live once getaliquot.com is registered and mail is set up.
Try it first
The demo runs the real logic — FEFO consumption, forecasting, supplier batching, compliance findings. Nothing is signed up for.
Open the live demoThe board
What people have asked for.
Sorted by votes. Requests with the most support get built first.