Castiron Shut Down — The Best Alternatives for Cottage Food Bakers (2026)

If you ran your bake sales through Castiron, you woke up to a problem this winter. Here's where to land — honestly, by category, including the back-of-house piece most "alternatives" lists forget.

What happened to Castiron

Castiron was one of the platforms that rode sourdough's post-pandemic boom: a hosted storefront built specifically for cottage-food sellers, with order forms, pickup windows, and payments tuned for someone selling cookies, jam, or loaves out of a home kitchen. For a lot of bakers it was the first thing that made "selling to neighbors" feel like a real business.

In late 2025 it wound down. If you were a seller, that means the storefront link you printed on your labels, shared in your Instagram bio, and texted to regulars no longer takes orders — and the customer list, order history, and order-taking flow you'd built up needs a new home. Thousands of small food makers are migrating right now, mostly in a hurry, mostly without a clean export of everything they wish they had.

What cottage-food bakers actually need

Here's the thing most migration guides gloss over: "a Castiron replacement" is really two different jobs, and no single tool does both well.

1. Front-of-house — taking orders. A storefront or order form, a way to collect money, pickup/delivery windows, and customer notifications. This is the part Castiron was famous for.
2. Back-of-house — actually producing the order. Once 23 people have ordered 41 loaves across three recipes, when do you mix? when do you feed your starter? how much flour do you buy? what does each label say? Castiron never really did this part — most bakers ran it on a whiteboard, a paper notebook, or a spreadsheet held together with hope.

When you're picking new tools, decide which job each one is solving. The mistake we see is bakers replacing only the storefront, then discovering that the 6 a.m. math — the schedule, the scaling, the shopping list — is exactly as stressful as it always was.

There's also a money angle worth naming. The storefront tools all take a cut or a monthly fee on the selling side. None of them save you time on the making side, which for most home bakers is the actual bottleneck — you can only fit so many bakes around a day job and one home oven. When you compare options, weigh both: what it costs to take an order, and what it costs you in hours to fulfill one.

Storefront & order-taking alternatives

These replace the front-of-house side of Castiron: the page customers visit to place an order and pay. Honest summaries below — your state's cottage-food rules and your fee tolerance matter more than any feature list.

Hotplate

Purpose-built for food makers doing drops, pre-orders, and pickup windows. Strong fit if you sell in batches ("Saturday pickup, ordering opens Tuesday") rather than always-on inventory. Handles the storefront, payments, and customer notifications well. It does not plan your production — it tells you what was ordered, not when to start mixing.

Homegrown and other Castiron-style storefronts

A cluster of platforms now position themselves directly at displaced Castiron sellers, offering the closest like-for-like: a hosted cottage-food storefront with order forms and payments. If you want the most familiar replacement with the least relearning, this category is the natural first stop. Same caveat: storefront only.

Square (and Square Online)

The generalist. Square Online gives you a free-to-start store, and Square's payments and in-person card reader are excellent if you also sell at a farmers market. It's less tailored to cottage food than the niche tools — you'll do more setup — but it's stable, cheap to begin, and you're not betting on a single small startup surviving. Again: it sells, it doesn't bake.

Back-of-house: production planning (the part storefronts skip)

This is where DoughPlan fits, so we'll be upfront about it: DoughPlan is not a storefront. It will not take your customers' orders or process payments. If that's all you need, use one of the tools above.

What DoughPlan does is the job that used to live on your whiteboard. You enter your products as baker's-percentage formulas once, then drop in the week's order quantities — however they came in, from Hotplate, a Square export, or texts from regulars — and it produces:

• A time-reversed bake schedule. You tell it when loaves need to be ready; it works backward through bake, proof, shape, bulk, and levain build to tell you when to feed your starter and when to mix — so you're not doing fragile arithmetic at midnight.
• Scaled formulas. Your 78%-hydration loaf, multiplied out to exactly the number ordered, in grams. (If you're shaky on the math, our guide to scaling with baker's percentages walks through it, and the free calculator does single recipes.)
• An aggregated shopping list. All recipes combined into one "buy this much flour, salt, and so on" total, so you order ingredients once for the whole week.
• Cottage-food labels. Printable labels with your ingredients and the disclosures cottage-food rules typically require.

It's deliberately priced and scoped for a microbakery — "FlourPower for the rest of us." The big production-planning systems are built for a wholesale operation pushing out 400 loaves a day; DoughPlan is for the person selling 40 a week from a home oven. There's a free tier (one product), and paid plans at $19/mo (Baker) and $39/mo (Market) when you outgrow it.

So what should you actually do?

For most former Castiron bakers, the clean answer is pair two tools: one storefront to take orders and money, one production planner to run the bake. They do different jobs and they don't compete.

A simple, low-regret migration plan:

1. Export and back up everything from your old Castiron account today.
2. Stand up a storefront from the front-of-house list so customers can order again — start with whichever matches how you sell (drops vs. always-on vs. in-person).
3. Set up your products as formulas in DoughPlan for free, so the first busy weekend on your new storefront doesn't also mean a return to whiteboard math.

A note on lock-in, since you just lived through it: whatever you pick next, prefer tools that let you export your data — your customer list, your orders, your formulas. The lesson of the Castiron shutdown isn't "this one platform was bad," it's that any single tool can go away. Keeping a clean backup of your contacts and your recipes means the next migration, if it ever comes, is a weekend chore instead of a crisis.

You lost a tool, not your business. Your recipes, your regulars, and your reputation came with you. The goal now is to rebuild the order-taking side and finally put the production side on something better than memory.