There are home bakery platforms that cost less than a couple of coffees a month. Some start around $5 or $10, which raises a fair question: why would anyone choose a platform that charges a fee when you sell instead?
The reality is that sometimes they shouldn't.
If you have a busy home bakery with steady sales every month and you already know how to keep orders coming in, a low monthly subscription may be the less expensive option. You pay the same amount whether you sell $500 or $5,000, and at higher sales volumes that math gets pretty compelling, quickly.
We chose a different model for OurCakewalk because many of the bakers we're building it for aren't running businesses that look like that. We want to help get them there but we recognize that's not where they're starting.
They might open preorders every other week, sell at markets during the summer or go all-in around Christmas and barely bake for sale in January. Some are starting with a product everyone tells them they should sell and have absolutely no idea whether their first drop will get four orders or forty.
We didn't want those bakers paying us during the months when they weren't making any money, it wouldn't be fair and would be an extra burden when they're already incurring startup costs.
Why we chose to get paid when you do
OurCakewalk has no monthly subscription. When you make a sale, we charge a small service fee. You decide whether to pass that fee along to your customer, absorb it yourself or split it.
That means a baker who takes a month off doesn't have another subscription renewing without them noticing — subscription services often bank and profit on you forgetting to cancel. Someone trying their first drop doesn't need to decide whether it's worth signing up for another monthly expense before knowing if anyone will order.
It also means our interests are pretty closely tied to yours. If nobody buys anything through OurCakewalk, we don't make money from that drop either.
There is a trade-off, though, and we want to talk about it. If you're absorbing the service fee yourself and selling a lot every month, eventually a $5 or $10 subscription is going to be cheaper. It really comes down to simple math. If price is your main consideration and the platforms you're comparing give you everything you need, the monthly subscription is most likely the better choice.
The part worth looking at more closely is what you're getting for that price.
Taking an order is only part of running a drop
A platform might give you a page where customers place orders and a way to keep those orders organized. For some bakers, that's exactly what's needed. We built OurCakewalk around a slightly bigger problem: once this week's orders are picked up, how do you get those people back for the next drop?
When someone subscribes to your bakery on OurCakewalk, they get a text when your next drop opens. You aren't piecing together a storefront, order system, email list and separate texting service just to run a weekly preorder. All of that needs to be considered when you're thinking about the total cost. If one platform costs $7 a month but you're still responsible for finding everyone again each time you open orders, while another is helping you build a subscriber base you can reach with every new drop, the monthly price doesn't tell you very much on its own.
For a baker with an established audience and a reliable way to reach them, that difference may not matter. For someone still building repeat demand, it may matter a lot.
There's also the question of who pays
With a monthly subscription, the cost belongs to the bakery. It's another business expense, albeit potentially a very small one. With OurCakewalk, the service fee is connected to the order, and you choose how much of it you want to absorb.
Some bakers would much rather pay $10 every month themselves than add a service fee to a customer's order, which is completely reasonable. Others don't want a recurring expense and would rather have the cost show up only when a transaction actually happens. This is one of those decisions where the right answer depends on how you sell.
So which model makes more sense?
If your bakery has consistent monthly sales, you've already built an audience and you're looking mainly for an inexpensive way to manage orders, take a serious look at a monthly subscription. You'll 100% end up spending less. If your sales come in waves, you're still figuring out what people want to buy, you take breaks between drops or you're trying to build an audience that comes back each time you open orders, paying when you sell may fit the business much better.
That's why we chose this model for OurCakewalk.
We'd rather earn our money when a baker gets an order than collect a subscription while they're waiting for one.
