Questions micro bakers ask. Answered, with the numbers.

Enough to cover a full costing of the loaf, including your own hours, and no more than bakeries near you can get away with. On our worked example a loaf costs $5.85 to make with the baker's time counted, so $9.50 keeps $3.65 on top of the $12 an hour already counted, about $21 an hour for the 24 minutes the loaf takes. Below the floor you are paying people to take your bread; above the local ceiling it does not sell. How to pick a point between the two.

Four steps. Cost each product fully, hours included, to get its floor. Check what comparable bakeries nearby charge to get its ceiling. Choose a price between the two so every product pays you a similar hourly rate. Then review whenever an ingredient price moves. This is the floor-and-ceiling method. Baketly does the first and fourth automatically and shows the second from real listings nearby. The method, worked.

It is fast, and it is wrong in a way that hurts slow bakes most. Multiplying ingredients by four ignores how long a product occupies you, so it overprices fast items and underprices slow ones. On our example bakery it pays $7.88 an hour on a sourdough loaf and $36.00 an hour on cinnamon buns. Price from a full costing instead, then the rule becomes a sanity check rather than a method. Why the rule fails.

There is no universal number, because the figure that matters is margin per hour of your time, not margin per item. A loaf keeping $3.65 after a full costing is a strong margin; the same $3.65 on a product that takes three times as long is not. Baketly reports margin by product and by month, including margin per hour, so you compare like with like.

The same way as a loaf: cost the batch fully, divide by the number you can actually sell, add a price check nearby, and set a price that pays your hourly rate. Small items hide labour badly, which is why so many bakers lose money on decorated cookies. Our free recipe cost calculator works a batch through in a minute.

Set an hourly rate once and count it into every product, including unattended time like proving and cooling. On a sourdough loaf the baker's time is about 82% of the cost, so leaving it out does not round down a little, it changes the answer. Baketly asks for the rate during setup and applies it to every recipe from then on.

Usually yes, and sooner than feels comfortable, because a cost rise hits profit harder than cost. The multiplier is cost divided by profit: a 5% rise in ingredients takes about 8% off a loaf's profit and 13% off a cinnamon bun's. Baketly recosts every recipe the moment you update the sack price, so you see the drift before it eats a month. The arithmetic.

Less than most bakers assume. A 30% wholesale discount on a $9.50 loaf that costs $5.85 cuts profit from $3.65 to $0.80, a 78% drop, and the loaf goes below cost at 38% off. Wholesale needs its own costing with the delivery and packaging counted, not the market price minus a round number. Wholesale vs stall pricing.

If you have never costed a product with your own hours in it, almost certainly. The quick test: take your best seller, add up ingredients, packaging and the time it takes you at the rate you would want from a job, and compare with the price. Most home bakers find at least one product that pays under minimum wage.

Five numbers tell you: cost per item with your hours in it, margin per hour, the break-even for a market day, how far costs have drifted since you set prices, and which products earn their oven slot. Baketly keeps all five current from your pantry and sales. Running a micro bakery by the numbers.

Price the pantry per gram, cost the batch from those prices, add packaging and your hours, then divide by the number of items you can sell, not the number the recipe makes. Worked on a batch of four loaves the answer is $5.85 each. Do it properly once and the number stays right as long as the pantry prices are kept current. Costing in four steps.

Divide the price of the sack by its weight in grams. A 16 kg sack at $19.60 is $0.001225 a gram, so 500 g of flour in a loaf costs about $0.61. Baketly reads the weight and price from a photo of the label and does the division for you.

Yes. In Baketly a recipe draws its ingredient costs from your pantry, so the cost per loaf or per box is always current. Change the price of one sack and every recipe that uses it moves with it. Free on iPhone and in the Wix App Market.

Ours is free, runs in the browser, needs no sign-up and stores nothing. It works out what a batch costs including your own hours and what the price pays per hour. It answers one batch at a time; to keep the numbers and watch them move, that is what the app is for. Try it.

On our worked sourdough loaf, about 82%. Ingredients and packaging come to roughly a dollar; the baker's hours at $12 an hour make up the rest. That is why a costing without labour looks wonderful and a bakery run on it does not.

Convert to grams at the ingredient level and cost from there. Baketly lets a recipe use a different unit than the ingredient was bought in, converts automatically for common ingredients, and lets you define your own conversions in Settings for the awkward ones like a cup of your particular flour.

Cost each part as its own recipe and combine them. Baketly costs recipe parts separately, so a babka's dough, filling and glaze each carry their own cost and a change to the chocolate price moves only the filling.

It depends which of three problems you have, because the tools are poor at each other's job. Taking orders needs an ordering platform. Tracking stock needs inventory software. Knowing what a bake costs and should sell for needs a costing app, which is Baketly. A decision guide, including when Baketly is the wrong answer.

Apply two tests to any candidate: does it count your own hours, and does it recost every recipe when a supplier price moves. Most free calculators fail the first and all of them fail the second, because they keep nothing. Baketly passes both, which is the whole reason it exists. The best app for pricing baked goods.

Cottage food businesses have three separate needs: selling, costing and compliance. No single app covers all three. Baketly handles costing and pricing; an ordering platform handles selling; your state's department of agriculture is the only source for the rules. Which app for which need.

One that understands the day itself costs money. Counted with the booth fee, fuel, kit and six hours at the table, a market day breaks even at 43 loaves rather than the 11 the fee alone suggests. Baketly plans the bake for a market, takes cash at the stall and shows afterwards whether the day paid. The best app for farmers market bakers.

Baketly is free to start on iPhone and on a Wix site, with the pantry, recipe costing, market days and the nearby price check all included. No card is needed to begin.

A well-built spreadsheet does everything Baketly does. The difference is upkeep. The test is what happens when a sack of flour changes price: in Baketly that is one edit; in most spreadsheets it is fifty, because they store calculated costs rather than purchases. Baketly vs a spreadsheet.

For one batch, a calculator is fine, and ours is free. A calculator answers one question and keeps nothing, so it cannot tell you what your margins did last month or which product pays best per hour, and most leave out your labour entirely. Baketly keeps the numbers and keeps them current. The comparison.

They are built for different bakeries. CakeBoss is order-driven software for decorating businesses: orders, deposits, scheduling and invoicing with costing attached. Baketly has no customer ordering and is built for repeat products sold at markets and to regulars. If your week is custom cakes with deposits, CakeBoss is the better fit. Baketly vs CakeBoss.

Stocksmith is inventory and cost-of-goods software for makers carrying stock. Baketly costs bakes and market days for one person selling direct, and does no stock valuation. They are not substitutes; a bakery that needs an inventory ledger needs Stocksmith or similar. Baketly vs Stocksmith.

You can, but its assumptions will mislead you. Restaurant tools assume paid staff, a menu and daily service, and treat labour as payroll. In a micro bakery the labour is your own unpaid time, which is why food-cost percentage gives the wrong answer there. Why restaurant tools misfire.

No. Baketly does costing and pricing; it does not have a storefront, order forms or pickup scheduling. Ordering platforms do that well and are commonly used alongside Baketly. If taking orders is the problem you are solving today, start there. Baketly alternatives, by need.

Only the pantry, and only for costing. It tracks what each ingredient costs per gram so recipes price themselves; it does not value stock, run reorder points or produce an inventory report. For a bakery carrying real stock that is a different tool.

No. It is not accounting software, does not file taxes and does not produce statutory accounts. It tells you what a bake costs and what it earns, which is the number your accountant will ask you for.

Several, and some are better choices for the need they match. Ordering platforms for taking orders, inventory software for stock, CakeBoss for custom-order decorators, a spreadsheet if you enjoy maintaining one, a free calculator for a single batch. The most common reason to look elsewhere is that Baketly does not take customer orders. An honest list.

Four things we could not find a listed equivalent for: a price check against real bakeries nearby, an assistant that answers from your own numbers, projected against actual profit after a market day, and recipe parts costed separately. Compared against what other apps publish.

Baketly is a recipe costing app for home bakers and micro bakeries. It prices your pantry per gram from a photo of the label, costs every recipe from that pantry with your own hours counted, and recosts everything the moment an ingredient price changes. Free to start on iPhone and as a Wix app. It answers two questions, what did this bake cost me to make and what should I charge for it, and keeps both answers current as prices move. The pricing method behind it is the floor-and-ceiling method.

Yes, it is free to start on iPhone and on a Wix site. Download it from the App Store or add it to your site from the Wix App Market.

No. Baketly is an iPhone app, and there is no Android version. If you are not on iPhone, the Wix version runs on your Wix site in any browser.

Baketly runs on the web as a Wix app: add it to your Wix site from the Wix App Market and you are signed in with your Wix account, no separate login. The iPhone app and the Wix app share one set of data.

Yes. Open Settings in the iPhone app and tap Link to Web, scan the QR code shown in the Wix app, and from then on the same pantry, recipes and sales appear on both.

Point the camera at the label on a sack or packet. Baketly reads the weight and the price and derives the cost per gram, so a 16 kg sack at $19.60 becomes $0.001225 a gram. Every recipe using that ingredient updates at once.

On iPhone, yes. Photograph a handwritten or printed recipe and Baketly fills in the ingredients and quantities as a new recipe for you to check. This is a phone-only feature; the Wix app does not have it.

An assistant that answers plain-language questions from your own numbers, not from the internet. Ask which product pays best per hour, what Saturday's market cleared, or whether you can afford to drop a price, and the answer comes from your pantry and your sales.

Yes. The price check shows what bakeries in your area charge for a comparable item, rather than a national average, so the ceiling for your price is a local one.

Yes. Create an event for a market, a pop-up or a single order, set the booth fee, decide how many of each recipe to bake, and Baketly shows the projected profit. The recipe calculator scales the ingredient amounts to that quantity. After the day, you see projected against actual.

The stall till in Baketly records cash sales at the table, for one person selling at a market, and counts them against the day. It is not a point-of-sale system for a shop with a counter and staff.

Your pantry, recipes and sales are yours and are used to answer your questions, not sold. The privacy policy has the detail, and the terms of use are written to be read too.

Email contact@baketly.com and a person will answer. There is also a Contact Us section inside the app for feedback and feature requests.

On an illustrative $1,250 of kit, it pays back in 343 loaves if you pay yourself $12 an hour, or 148 if you do not. The kit is rarely the problem; the price list is. The full worked costing.

An extra loaf is worth baking only if its chance of selling beats cost divided by price: 62% for a $5.85 loaf selling at $9.50, 73% for a $1.20 bun selling at $1.65. So selling out most markets is correct, not a failure of planning. A half-price day-old outlet drops the line to 23%. How to decide.

Only if you counted the whole day. Against the booth fee alone, a stall breaks even at about 11 loaves. Counting fuel, kit and six hours of your time at the table, it is closer to 43. Baketly costs the day with all of it and shows projected against actual once you are home. Did the market day pay?

Cottage food is a legal category set per state or country, covering what you may sell from a home kitchen. A micro bakery is a business shape: one or two people baking, selling and doing the books. A small bakery with staff and a lease is a different animal, and advice for one rarely fits the others. Which one are you running?

No, and no app should. Cottage food rules are set per state or country and change; your state's department of agriculture is the only reliable source. Baketly helps with the money, not the law.