Practical, no-fluff guides for home and cottage-food bakers — scaling formulas, planning bake days, and choosing the tools that actually fit a 40-loaves-a-week operation.
Friends keep asking to buy your bread? The honest path from hobby to side income — what's legal under cottage-food rules, what to charge so you actually profit, how to take orders, and how to plan a bake day without the 3 a.m. panic.
Read the guide →Hotplate is a great preorder-drop storefront — but a storefront takes orders, it doesn't plan the bake. An honest map of which "Hotplate alternative" you actually need: a different way to sell, or the back-of-house production planner no storefront includes.
Read the comparison →Craftplan is a popular open-source ERP for artisanal makers — but it's self-hosted and general-purpose. If you want bake-day planning that just works in a browser, built around sourdough fermentation with no server to deploy, here's an honest, side-by-side comparison.
Read the comparison →Flourwise, Sour & Dough, Flour Hour and similar apps plan one bake beautifully — but none aggregate a week of customer orders into one production plan, shopping list, and labels. An honest map of which app is for the home baker and which is for the baker who sells.
Read the comparison →An honest comparison of what a micro bakery can actually use to plan production — DoughPlan, Cybake, BakeSmart, Craftybase, CakeBoss, Hotplate, the discontinued Castiron, and spreadsheets — plus how to choose by your volume.
Read the comparison →Craftybase is great at inventory, COGS, and taxes — but it doesn't plan your bake day. An honest, side-by-side look at where the two tools differ and which one fits the problem you actually have.
Read the comparison →CakeBoss manages orders, costing, and invoices — built by a home baker — but it doesn't plan your sourdough bake day. A side-by-side look at where the two differ and which fits a bread baker's fermentation timing.
Read the comparison →Stop matching the stall next door. Work out your real cost per loaf, climb the COGS → wholesale → retail markup ladder, price each channel, and pay yourself — with a full worked example for a 900 g country loaf.
Read the guide →The size where a hobby turns into a business. Plan backward from market time, do the oven bake-window math that actually limits you, build the levain on time — with a full schedule and the grams worked out.
Read the guide →Every cottage food label needs six things — producer name and address, ingredients, allergens (including sesame), net weight, and your state's required disclaimer. Here's each one, with sample loaf labels.
Read the guide →Castiron is gone. Here's an honest, category-by-category look at where its sellers should land — both for taking orders and for the back-of-house production work storefronts ignore.
Read the guide →What baker's percentage really means, how to compute hydration, and how to scale a single loaf up to 40 — with worked numbers, a real table, and the mistakes that bite most bakers.
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