Know what every batch costs, and what to charge.
Work out what each batch really costs, set selling prices with clear margin or markup, and see which recipes change when an ingredient price changes.
Free to use. No account needed. Prices exclude tax.
- Ingredients
- £2.10
- Labour, 30 min at £12/hour
- £6.00
- Packaging
- £1.20
- Batch cost
- £9.30
- Cost per item
- £0.775
- Price at 50% margin
- £1.55
Three ways bakers underprice without noticing
Most pricing mistakes aren't about the maths being hard. They come from leaving something out or letting numbers go stale.
Leaving out your own time
In a typical batch of shortbread, half an hour of labour costs more than all the ingredients put together. Leave it out and a product can look profitable while it pays you nothing.
Mixing up margin and markup
A 50% margin and a 50% markup give different prices. On a 77.5p biscuit, that's the difference between £1.55 and about £1.16. Choose the wrong one and you undercharge on every sale.
Prices that go out of date
You costed your range last spring. Since then butter, eggs and flour have all moved. Without a way to see which recipes each change affects, the prices you charge drift away from the costs.
How the calculator works
- 1
Enter what you paid
For each ingredient, type the pack size and price from your receipt, then how much the recipe uses. Grams and kilograms convert for you, as do millilitres and litres.
- 2
Add time and packaging
Minutes of work at your hourly rate, plus boxes, bags and labels. Then say how many items the batch makes.
- 3
Get a cost and a price
See the batch cost, the cost per item, and a selling price from the margin or markup you choose, with every step of the sum shown.
The sums keep full precision and only round for display, so a total is never built from rounded-off pennies. The calculator page shows every formula with a worked example.
When flour goes up, see what it does to your range
Your supplier puts flour up from £2.00 to £3.00 a kilo. In a saved workspace you change the price once. The shortbread, which uses 500 g, goes from £9.30 to £9.80 a batch, and every other recipe with flour in it shows its own before and after. Recipes without flour stay as they were.
The costing sheet you downloaded last month still says £9.30. Sheets are dated records of the prices you used that day, so you can always see what you knew when you set a price.
Start free, save when you're ready
Free calculator
No account needed
- Cost any recipe from pack sizes and prices
- Labour, packaging and yield included
- Selling price from margin or markup
- Every figure shows how it was worked out
Saved workspace
£12 a month
- One ingredient list shared by all your recipes
- Change a price once, with the date kept
- See which recipes moved, before and after
- Dated PDF costing sheets that never change
- Export everything as JSON at any time
Made for small bakeries
It's for home bakers, market stalls, cake makers and small bakeries that sell a regular range and want each product priced properly. It does one job: costing and pricing recipes. There's no stock control, supplier ordering, nutrition labelling or till integration, so there's nothing to set up before it's useful.
Questions
Is the calculator really free?
Yes. You can cost as many recipes as you like without an account. You only need an account to save recipes and keep an ingredient list.
Should I use margin or markup?
Either works if you're consistent. Margin is profit as a share of the selling price, which is how most businesses talk about profit. Markup is profit as a share of cost. The calculator labels which one you used, so you never mix them up.
Does it include VAT?
No. All costs and prices exclude tax. If you're VAT registered, add VAT to the selling price the calculator gives you.
What about rent, electricity and waste?
They aren't added automatically. Most bakers cover them through their hourly rate, a small packaging allowance or a higher margin. Whatever you choose, the sheet shows the assumptions you used.
Can I use cups or convert grams to millilitres?
No. Converting volume to weight depends on the ingredient, and guessing gives wrong costs. Enter each ingredient in the same kind of unit you buy it in: g, kg, ml, l or each.
What happens to a calculation if I sign up?
If you start in the calculator and then create an account, the recipe you were working on is carried across, so you don't type it twice.