FREE CALCULATOR
Price custom cakes, cookies and other baked orders so the hours you spend decorating and cleaning up are actually paid for.
Many areas require a cottage-food license, permit or registration to sell home-baked goods, and rules differ by location — check your local and state requirements before you sell. Numbers are estimates for planning.
Ingredients are the smaller part of a custom cake. Baking, cooling, making buttercream, decorating, boxing, and cleaning up an entire kitchen can easily take four hours or more. Pricing from the grocery receipt alone means working for a few dollars an hour. Count every hour, including shopping and cleanup, at a rate you would accept from an employer.
Your oven, mixer, pans, electricity and water all cost money even though they never show up on a receipt for a specific order. A small overhead percentage spreads those costs across your orders. A profit percentage on top is what lets the business grow — replacing equipment, buying in bulk, or covering a slow month — instead of just paying your wage. Divide the final price by servings to sanity-check it against bakery prices in your area.
Enter ingredient prices once with yield %, build prep recipes like dough and frosting, cost every item in any unit (lb, oz, cups, tbsp, each), and get suggested prices and flags for items over target. Excel and Google Sheets.
Add ingredients, packaging and your labor (all hours times your hourly rate), add an overhead percentage, then add your profit percentage. Divide by servings to get a per-serving price.
Every hour: shopping, baking, making fillings and frosting, decorating, boxing and cleanup. Many home bakers undercount by leaving out cleanup and decorating.
Many areas require a cottage-food license, permit or registration, and the rules vary by location. Check with your local and state authorities before selling.
Free to use, no sign-up. Built by Gragg Robotics, LLC in Waterville, Maine. More free tools: all calculators.