Stellar AIO vs. Refract: what you pay, and what you get.

Stellar and Refract are two of the best-known retail bots in 2026, and both sit in the top tier of cook-groups.com's July 2026 bot rankings. Once you're in, they cost about the same to keep. The real differences are the price of getting in, and which stores you need.

By Pounce · Updated October 5, 2026

Prices, sites, and stats come from Stellar's and Refract's websites, checked October 5, 2026. Pokémon Center notes also draw on House of Carts' bot comparison (verified September 13, 2026) and cook-groups.com's Pokémon bot tier list (July 2026). We haven't run either bot for this comparison, and neither company reviewed it. Pounce is our product. It isn't a checkout bot; it works Facebook Marketplace.

The short version

• Choose Stellar if you want the widest store list, including Pokémon Center, Costco, Sam's Club, and Shopify sites, or you shop outside the US. It's also the cheaper way in.
• Choose Refract if your drops are on Amazon, Target, Walmart, Best Buy, or Apple, and you're fine paying $1,999 up front for a bot built around those five stores.
• Choose neither yet if you haven't priced proxies, accounts, and your time, or you don't know what you'd buy and where you'd sell it. The license is the smaller part of the cost.

Side by side

Stellar's annual renewal after the first year is listed at $599 by House of Carts. Vendor stats are the vendors' own claims; we haven't verified them.

The price math

The headline prices look far apart, and for the first year they are: about $949 for Stellar against $2,449 for Refract. But look at what it costs to keep each one. Stellar is $150 a quarter. Refract is $50 a month. Both come to about $600 a year.

So the choice isn't really “cheap bot or expensive bot”. It's whether Refract's focus on five big stores is worth an extra $1,500 to get in, compared with Stellar's much wider list. If you need Pokémon Center, the question answers itself, because Refract doesn't list it.

Where Stellar fits

You want coverage. Stellar lists more than 70 sites, from big-box stores to Pokémon Center, Costco, Sam's Club, GameStop, sneaker sites, and every Shopify store.

You buy Pokémon. Pokémon Center is on Stellar's list, alongside the big-box stores that carry sealed product.

You're outside the US, or buy from other regions. Stellar lists support for the US, Japan, Canada, the EU, and the UK.

You want a lower entry price. $499 for three months is still a lot of money, but it's a quarter of Refract's entry.

The trade-offs are setup and focus. More sites means more modules to learn and keep working, and House of Carts rates its learning curve as high. Cook-groups.com's tier list calls Stellar the broadest option but ranks it behind Refract on Walmart and Target specifically.

Where Refract fits

Your drops are on the big five. Amazon, Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and Apple are where Refract is built to work, and its site lists stock monitoring, queue handling, 2FA code handling, and proxy and profile management for them.

You care most about Walmart and Target. Cook-groups.com's 2026 tier list rates Refract the strongest tool for Walmart and excellent on Target.

You want fewer moving parts. A short store list means fewer modules to learn and maintain.

You'll run it for years. After the entry fee, $50 a month is in line with Stellar.

The trade-offs are the $1,999 entry, the $50 a month for each extra device running at once, and no listed Pokémon Center support.

What neither license covers

The license is the start, not the cost. To actually check out, you also need:

• Proxies. Residential proxies run roughly $2 to $8.50 per GB depending on the provider, and ISP proxies are priced per IP. Big drops burn through data.
• Accounts and payment details. Retailers limit how much one account can buy, so scaling up means more accounts, addresses, and cards to manage.
• Information. Most people pay for a restock Discord or cook group. Pokémon-focused groups listed by cook-groups.com run $7.99 to $9.99 a month.
• Time. Setup, testing, keeping modules working, and being awake for drops.

We break down a realistic first quarter, and how many wins it takes to break even, in our Pokémon bot cost guide.

Is either one worth it in 2026?

Our honest take: for most people, the bot isn't the hard part anymore. Competition on hyped drops is so high that botting isn't sustainable for most people, and the cost to get started is very high. When thousands of people run good bots on the same drop, owning a good bot stops being an edge. Queues, purchase limits, and bot detection take out more of what's left.

If you already have one and it pays for itself, keep going. If you're deciding whether to spend $500 to $2,000 to start, price the whole setup first, and look at where else your money and time could work.

The lane next to your bot

A lot of what sells out at retail shows up on Facebook Marketplace weeks or years later: sealed Pokémon, consoles, GPUs, and electronics, listed by people who want them gone. There's no queue and no checkout race there. The race is getting to the listing and the seller first.

That's the job Pounce does. It watches Marketplace with ready-made, priced categories like sealed Pokémon, game consoles, and graphics cards, sends deals to your Discord, and can open the conversation with the seller. It runs on Windows, monitors Facebook Marketplace only, and pauses at least eight hours a day. How Marketplace bots differ from retail bots.

Common questions