BaketlyEvery micro bakery solves this eventually, usually in this order: mental arithmetic, then a spreadsheet, then a period of not looking at it, then something else. Here is what each option is actually for.
A spreadsheet
Good at: everything, in principle. It is free, it is yours, it does exactly what you build, and a well-made one — a pantry sheet with cost per gram, recipe sheets that reference it — is a genuinely good costing system. Many excellent small bakeries run on one.
Where it fails: not capability, upkeep. The build is the fun part; the maintenance is remembering, on a Tuesday, which of your recipes use the flour whose price just changed, and editing each one. Most people do this enthusiastically for a few months and then stop, and the sheet becomes a record of what things cost last spring. The spreadsheet does not tell you it has gone stale. That is the whole problem.
A free online pricing calculator
Good at: one decision, right now. Someone asks for a custom cake and you need a defensible number before you reply. Type in ingredients, hours, a margin, read out a price. Fast, free, no setup.
Where it fails: they are single-shot by design and keep nothing. There is no pantry, so you re-enter ingredient costs every time and they are only as current as your memory. And because nothing is stored, the questions that matter over a season — what did my margins do, which product pays best per hour, did that market pay — have nowhere to be asked.
Subscription inventory platforms
Good at: businesses with real inventory. Tools built for makers selling across several channels track stock, batches, and cost of goods over time, which is exactly what you need when you have materials sitting in a stockroom and an accountant asking what they were worth in March. They do track cost changes properly.
Where it fails: fit and cost. They are built around inventory management and a monthly fee that a business with inventory can justify. One person baking on Thursday for a Saturday market has very little inventory and a lot of unpriced labour — the opposite shape. You end up paying for the part you do not use and hand-rolling the part you do.
A dedicated micro bakery app
Good at: the specific shape of this business. Baketly is one of these, so read this knowing where it comes from.
The pantry is priced per gram from a photo of the label. Recipes cost themselves from it, so a sack price change is one edit and every recipe follows. Your hourly rate is set once and lands in everything. Market days are costed against the booth fee, so a $40 table has to earn its place. And because the data persists, it can answer the question this blog keeps returning to: which of your products makes the most per hour of your time.
Where it fails: it is narrow on purpose. It is not accounting software and will not do your taxes. It is not a point-of-sale system for a shop with staff. If you need any of those, one of the three above is your answer and this one is not.
The question that actually separates them
Not features. This:
A sack of flour goes up forty cents. How many things do you have to change?
If the answer is one, your costing will still be true in a year. If it is fifty, it will not, no matter how good the tool is or how disciplined you are — because fifty edits is a job nobody does twice.
That is a question about how a tool stores things, and you can ask it of any of the four. A spreadsheet with a proper pantry sheet answers one. A spreadsheet with costs typed into each recipe answers fifty, and the two look identical from the outside.
The short version
Spreadsheets are capable and go stale. Calculators answer one question well and remember nothing. Inventory platforms are built for a business with inventory. Pick on how the tool stores a purchase, not on its feature list — and whatever you pick, do the costing properly once, because none of them can supply your yields, your hours or your pack sizes.
Read next
- How to cost a recipe properly, once
- Flour went up. What does that actually do to your prices?
- How to run a micro bakery by the numbers
Questions
Is a spreadsheet good enough to cost a bakery?
Technically, yes — a spreadsheet can do everything on this page, and a well-built one with a pantry sheet the recipes reference is genuinely good. The failure is not capability, it is upkeep, and it shows up months later as a price list quietly built on old invoices.
Are free recipe cost calculators worth using?
For a single decision, yes. They are a quick way to sanity-check one product. They are not built to keep state, so they cannot tell you what your margin was last month or which product pays you best per hour.
Do I need inventory software?
Only if you have inventory to manage. If you sell across several channels and need stock levels and cost-of-goods for your accounts, those platforms earn their fee. For one person with a market stall on Saturday, most of what you are paying for is machinery you will not use.
What should I look for in a costing tool?
One thing above all: that it stores what you paid for a purchase rather than a cost you calculated. If a flour price change is one edit rather than fifty, the tool will stay current. If it is fifty, it will not, regardless of what else it does.
Can I move from a spreadsheet later?
Yes, and your spreadsheet is the best possible preparation — you will already know your yields, your hours per batch and your pack costs, which are the parts only you can supply.
Built for the Tuesday the flour goes up
Baketly stores what you paid, not what you calculated, so one sack price change moves every recipe that uses it. Free on iPhone.
Download on the App Store