How to price your cakes: try our free cost and profit calculator
Many home bakers start selling their cakes because friends and family love them, then struggle to work out what to charge. Pricing by guesswork, or by copying the person down the road, is the quickest way to end up working long hours for very little.
Why so many bakers undercharge
The ingredients are the easy part to count. The costs that go missing are usually the ones that quietly eat the profit:
- Packaging such as boxes, boards, ribbon and cards
- Your own time, including shopping, baking, decorating and cleaning up
- Energy for the oven and the fridge
- Card, platform and marketplace fees taken from every sale
- A profit margin, so the business can grow and not just break even
What the calculator works out
Enter what a batch costs, how many items it makes, how long it takes and the hourly wage you want to earn. The calculator shows two prices: the break-even price, which covers every cost including your wage and any selling fees, and a recommended price, which adds your profit margin on top.
- Cost per item, split into ingredients, packaging, your time and overheads
- Break-even price per cake, cupcake or box
- Recommended price with your profit margin included
- A quick check of any price you have in mind, showing your profit and the hourly rate you would really earn
- A cost breakdown for the whole batch
A worked example
Take a batch of 12 cupcakes with £9.00 of ingredients, £0.50 of packaging per cupcake, two hours of your time at £12 an hour and £3.00 for energy. The whole batch costs £42.00, which is £3.50 per cupcake. That is your break-even price.
Add a 20% profit margin on top of the cost and the recommended price becomes £4.20 per cupcake.
Now try selling at £5.00. You make £1.50 profit on each cupcake, £18.00 across the batch, and your effective hourly rate rises to £21. Drop the price to £3.00 and the calculator warns you that you are earning less than your own hourly wage.
Copy it, share it, print it
Once you have a price you are happy with, copy the result as plain text, share it from your phone or print it for your records. Nothing you enter is saved or sent anywhere.
Try it for free
The calculator is free to use, with no sign-up. When you are ready to price every recipe, quote customers and keep your whole baking business in one place, the Glowing Constellation App is there to grow with you.