It started with our sister's bakery. And a price list she made up.

The gut-feeling price list

Our sister is Ella Dremel, and her micro bakery is Lali Bakery in West Orange, New Jersey: sourdough, custom cakes and cookies, sold at farmers markets and for pickup and delivery. She is the kind of baker who can talk for an hour about hydration and fermentation, who has opinions about butter, who will redo a batch at midnight because the crumb was not right. When it comes to what she makes, she is passionate and she is a visionary.

When it comes to the money, not so much. That is not a criticism; it is the whole point. One evening we asked her how she priced her sourdough buns, and the honest answer was: by feel. A number that sounded fair, rounded to something that looked nice on a chalkboard. No costing behind it, no idea what an hour of her time was worth in the price, no idea which products were carrying the others.

She was not doing anything wrong. She was doing what nearly every home baker does, because the alternative looked like bookkeeping, and bookkeeping is not why anyone starts a bakery.

A spreadsheet, then an app

So we built her a spreadsheet. It priced her pantry per gram, costed each recipe from it, and counted her hours. It was already better than the chalkboard. It was also a spreadsheet, which means it was current for about three weeks and then it was not.

The spreadsheet became an app, made for her and nobody else. It read the price off a flour sack from a photo. It recosted every recipe when butter went up. It told her what a market day had to take before it paid for itself. And because it was hers, she actually used it.

What she found out

The first month on the app, she learned more about her bakery than in the two years before it. Which ingredients were worth buying in bulk and which were not. What her packaging really cost per item. Which products were quietly paying her less than minimum wage.

Her monthly sales went up. So did her efficiency, which in a one-person bakery is the same thing as her evenings. She kept baking exactly the way she loves to bake. She just stopped giving it away.

Why it is for everyone now

Once we saw what it did for one baker, keeping it to ourselves felt wrong. Every home bakery and micro bakery we talked to had the same story: brilliant at the craft, pricing by instinct, leaving money on the table without knowing it was there. So we built Baketly for all of them.

The goal has not changed. Let bakers focus on the baking, and make sure they do not miss out on the money. Make them financially free to keep doing the thing they love. Do it as simply as it can be done, and explain every number, so a baker can see exactly why a loaf costs what it costs and start raising their margins with confidence rather than guesswork.

• Built from real kitchens

  Every feature started as something a working baker needed. Our sister was first; now it is the bakers who write to us.

• Explained, not just calculated

  A number you cannot see the inside of is a number you will not trust. Baketly shows its working on every cost.

• Still improving

  The app keeps changing, and it changes in the direction bakers point it. If something would help you charge the right price, tell us.

Say hello

We read everything. If you run a home bakery and something in Baketly should work differently, or something is missing, write to contact@baketly.com or use Contact us inside the app. The best features we have shipped came from exactly those emails.