Most home bakers underprice — not because they can't do math, but because charging real money for something you love making feels strange at first. Here's a way to price that holds up, whether you're selling 10 loaves or 100.
Start with true ingredient cost
Not just flour and butter. Weigh in the parchment, the yeast, the vanilla you buy in the good bottle, and the two eggs in the wash. For most bakes, honest ingredient cost lands 20–40% higher than the first number you guessed.
The ×3 starting point
A classic small-food-business rule of thumb: ingredients × 3 is your floor, not your price. One third covers ingredients, one third covers everything else (packaging, labels, power, the farmers-market table fee, card fees), and one third is actually yours. If your sourdough costs $2.80 in ingredients, $8.40 is where the conversation starts — not where it ends.
Now add the thing everyone forgets: your time
Count your active hours for a full batch — mixing, shaping, baking, packing, pickup window — and decide what an hour of your life is worth. Divide that across the batch. If 20 loaves take you 5 active hours and you value your time at $25/hour, that's $6.25 per loaf of labour alone. Suddenly $12–14 a loaf isn't ambitious; it's arithmetic.
Fees are a cost of doing business — literally
Whatever platform or payment method you use, somebody processes the card. Build it into your price the way a restaurant builds in the dishwasher. (On OurCakewalk you can pass the service fee to customers, split it, or absorb it — but processing, like any card sale, comes out of your side. Price accordingly.)
Price tax-inclusive and round to friendly numbers
$12, not $11.73. Home-bakery customers pay with their gut, and clean numbers feel like a treat, not a transaction. If you're GST/HST registered, work the tax into the sticker price so nobody does math at your porch.
The sell-out signal
Here's the rule that replaces all the others once you're running drops: if you sell out in minutes, your price is low. Raise it 10–15% next drop. Your true fans will still be there, you'll bake the same amount for more money, and the people who ghost over a dollar were never going to sustain your business anyway.
Selling out should feel like a win — not like you paid for the privilege.