Price Roller-Coaster: Leaflink Cancels Price Increases
In early 2025, LeafLink — long considered the Amazon of wholesale platforms — rolled out a new usage-based pricing model. It was meant to scale “fairly” with transaction volume. Instead, it blew up in their face.
Operators across Colorado, Missouri, and beyond started seeing invoices triple, quadruple, even jump 1,000%. One Reddit user claimed their monthly bill jumped from $599 to $6,200. Others quietly began pulling their products, shifting to Distru or internal CRMs, or just going back to spreadsheets and email.
For many, it wasn’t about the money — it was the principle. Nobody likes paying more for a tool they barely use.
What is Leaflink?
LeafLink’s promise was always about streamlining wholesale: a single digital marketplace where retailers could browse products, place orders, and vendors could manage clients, payments, and compliance in one place. And it works — to a point.
The problem isn’t the feature set; it was how disconnected it was from real operations.
Here’s what actually happens in most operations:
Orders come in by text, email, or phone; everything still has to be entered in the system…
Staff scrambles to figure out whats actually in stock; not many operators use the integration…
The warehouse still has to pick, pack, and ship; this might include sublotting, stickering, packaging…
Accounting still reconciles by hand at month-end; hopefully everything was entered correctly (it wasnt, manifest dont match POs…)…
So when LeafLink doubled down on feature-heavy pricing, many operators asked the obvious question: What exactly are we paying for?
The Backlash
By May 2025, trade publications like Cultivated News and MoGreenway reported open revolt. Hundreds of brands in multiple states accused LeafLink of “surprise vendor price hikes.” Others described “a lack of transparency” and “no time to adjust budgets.”
The optics were bad — a billion-dollar platform squeezing local operators in a down market. Margins were already thin. Prices were falling double digits across categories like vapes and edibles. The timing couldn’t have been worse.
The Response
On October 6, 2025, new CEO Ashwin Raj released a video that did what few tech executives ever do: he admitted they got it wrong.
“Our transition to a usage-based fee was not the right call. We regret the frustration and confusion this caused… We will be discontinuing our usage fee model and reverting to a flat fee package for all our customers.”
Effective October 1, the usage model was dead. No more percentage-based fees. No more unpredictable invoices. Back to a flat-rate system — predictable, stable, and simple.
Raj didn’t sugarcoat it: there would be no refunds, but new contracts would reflect fixed monthly pricing. It was a course correction — and a public one.
The Ugly Truth
Even without the price hikes, LeafLink’s problem ran deeper. Most of its celebrated features — CRM, analytics, integrations — go unused. The real daily grind of wholesale doesn’t happen inside dashboards. It happens in warehouses, group chats, and paperwork.
The majority of operators only need four things:
Capture the order
Know what it is
Know where it’s going
Know how much it costs
Everything else is noise.
Services like Distru recognized this — offering a stripped-down wholesale ERP starting around $600/month. It’s functional, efficient, and built for people who need to track inventory, orders, and payments without the extras. Still, it requires attention to detail — and in this business, “data management” is not always the priority.
'“Million Peso Man”
After talking with operators across New Mexico, one thing’s clear — nobody runs everything through LeafLink. Most still juggle State Traceability, QuickBooks, and spreadsheets that never line up.
One of our clients, a small shop in Albuquerque, ditched pricey menu software for Google Sites and Slides, saving $40K in three years while staying competitive with an MSO across the street. That got us thinking — could we build something just as simple for order management?
Turns out, we could. Using Google Sheets and AppSheet, we built a shopping cart app for any size operator. It tracks inventory, captures orders, and generates POs. No subscriptions. No middlemen. You can learn more about this project on our website NMCDM.com
Because the best systems aren’t the most expensive — they’re the ones that actually get used.
