The short version: Cottage CMS has a Free Forever plan at $0 with no credit card, and it is a working shop: Square-powered checkout, pre-orders and weekly schedules, a public storefront, a product catalog, order forms, and customer records. Its Pro tier is $200 a year and adds a custom domain, delivery and shipping options, QR codes, text messaging, and digital products. Bake.Shop is $19 a month or $149 a year, which is $12.42 a month, with a 14-day trial, 0% commission, and card processing through Stripe at 2.9% plus 30 cents, stated plainly. If you sell for pickup and can live on a subdomain, Cottage CMS costs nothing. If you need delivery or your own domain, the comparison becomes $200 against $149 and Bake.Shop is cheaper.
All figures came off each company's own site in July 2026. Cottage CMS is changing its tiers in August 2026, which is covered below.
Both are built for cottage food sellers by people who sell cottage food, and both are honest about their pricing. They differ in where they draw the line between free and paid.
Cottage CMS gives away the core. Storefront, checkout, pre-orders, scheduling, catalog, order forms, and customer records are all on the free tier. What it charges for is reach and polish: a custom domain, delivery, shipping, text messaging, blog posts, digital products.
Bake.Shop charges for everything and includes everything. One price, unlimited orders and menu items, smart inventory tracking, 0% commission. There is no free tier to grow out of, and there is nothing gated above you either.
Which produces two genuinely different buying experiences:
Same four disclosures on both.
| Cottage CMS Free | Cottage CMS Pro | Bake.Shop | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $0 forever | $200/yr, which is $16.67/mo billed annually | $149/yr, which is $12.42/mo, or $19/mo monthly |
| Free trial | None needed, it is free. No credit card | 30-day money-back guarantee | 14-day free trial |
| Platform fee | Not stated | Not stated | $0, 0% commission on orders |
| Card processing | Square's rate, not restated by Cottage CMS | Square's rate | 2.9% + 30¢ through Stripe, stated plainly |
That processing row deserves attention. Bake.Shop names its processor and its rate, and states that the fee goes to Stripe rather than to them. Cottage CMS names Square as the checkout but does not restate the rate, which matters because Square charges 3.3% plus 30 cents online on its free plan and 2.9% plus 30 cents on its paid plans. Which one applies to a Cottage CMS storefront is a question worth asking, because 0.4 points on $18,000 of sales is $72 a year.
Take a baker doing $1,500 a month across 60 orders, a $25 average order and $18,000 a year.
Cottage CMS Free, assuming Square's 2.9% + $0.30
Cottage CMS Pro
Bake.Shop, yearly plan
So the ranking flips depending on what you need. If the free tier covers you, Cottage CMS wins by $149 a year and it is not close. If you need delivery or a custom domain, Bake.Shop is $51 a year cheaper than Cottage CMS Pro and includes inventory tracking that Pro does not advertise.
If Square's free-plan rate of 3.3% applies to your Cottage CMS checkout instead, add roughly $72 a year to both Cottage CMS lines, which would put Pro at about $1,010 against Bake.Shop's $887.
The free tier is genuinely capable, so the honest question is what is missing rather than whether it works.
Not included on Free:
For a baker selling for pickup at a market or a porch, none of that is fatal. For a baker who delivers, the free tier is a preview and Pro is the real price.
The subdomain question is worth thinking about separately from the rest, because people weight it inconsistently. A shop at yourbakery.cottagecms.com works perfectly well, loads the same, and takes the same payments as one at yourbakery.com. Customers arriving from a link you shared will not examine the domain. What a custom domain actually buys is the ability to print it on a card, say it out loud at a market, and keep it if you ever change software, which is the genuinely valuable part. If you never hand out your web address verbally or in print, the subdomain costs you nothing real. If you do, a domain you own is worth more than the $200 tier that unlocks it, because it makes every future platform decision reversible. That is the strongest argument for a custom domain and it has nothing to do with looking professional: moving between platforms is expensive mostly because your customers know where to find you, and a domain you control means they still find you afterwards. Test the export path on whichever tool you choose while it is still a hypothetical rather than an emergency.
Free tiers in this category are usually honest, so the question is not whether to trust them. It is what the free version quietly costs.
Point six is the one that reframes this whole comparison. Most bakers evaluating Cottage CMS against Bake.Shop will end up needing delivery or a domain within a year, which means the honest comparison is $200 against $149, not free against $149. Deciding on the free tier and then discovering the paid one is more expensive is the common path, and it is avoidable by comparing where you expect to be rather than where you are starting.
Worth knowing before you compare annual prices, because it moves.
Cottage CMS is launching a Scale tier at $370 a year in August 2026, and its own page states that full-feature access is moving up, encouraging sellers to start Pro before launch to keep today's feature set while their membership stays active.
The practical reading:
Bake.Shop has no equivalent announced change, which is worth something on its own if you value knowing what you are buying in eighteen months.
To be fair to Cottage CMS, announcing a repricing months ahead and offering existing members the old feature set is considerably more generous than the alternative, which is changing the terms on a Tuesday and emailing everyone afterwards. Plenty of software companies do the second thing. The reason it belongs in a comparison is timing rather than criticism: a decision made in July 2026 and a decision made in September 2026 are buying different products at different prices, and anyone reading a comparison article should know which one they are looking at.
Our fuller look at Bake.Shop for home bakers covers where it sits in the category.
Our fuller look at Cottage CMS alternatives covers the surrounding field, and our breakdown of what the Cottage CMS free plan leaves out goes deeper on the tier boundary.
Both are ordering tools built by bakers, and both leave the same jobs with you.
Two of those are worth pricing before you optimize a $51 difference. Sales tax registration and filing is real recurring work, and the SBA's guidance on registering your business is a reasonable starting point on what you are signing up for. If you also sell anything with a claim on the label, the FTC's advertising and marketing guidance covers what you can and cannot say about a product, which is your responsibility on any platform.
For contrast, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it does calculate, file, and remit sales tax in all 50 states, run local delivery with a radius and a route, handle pickup at several locations, and hide a home address until purchase. It does not do inventory caps, digital products, blogs, or text messaging, so it is not a strict upgrade on either of these. Different chores removed. You can test which set matters more in a week without changing anything you currently use.
Yes. The Free Forever plan is $0 with no credit card, and it includes Square checkout, pre-orders and weekly schedules, a public storefront, a catalog, order forms, and customer records. A custom domain, delivery, shipping, texting, and digital products are on Pro at $200 a year.
$19 a month, or $149 a year which works out to $12.42 a month. There is a 14-day free trial, 0% commission, and card payments run through Stripe at 2.9% plus 30 cents, which Bake.Shop states goes to Stripe rather than to them.
It depends on whether the Cottage CMS free tier covers you. If it does, Cottage CMS is free and Bake.Shop is $149 a year. If you need delivery or a custom domain, Cottage CMS Pro is $200 and Bake.Shop is $149, so Bake.Shop is $51 a year cheaper.
Bake.Shop. It lists smart inventory tracking so items come off the menu when they sell out. Cottage CMS does not advertise inventory caps on either tier.
Cottage CMS offers delivery and shipping options on Pro, not on Free. Bake.Shop does not advertise a delivery workflow. Neither plans a route for deliveries you make yourself.
On Bake.Shop, Stripe's 2.9% plus 30 cents, stated on their page. On Cottage CMS, whatever Square charges your account, which is 3.3% plus 30 cents on Square's free plan and 2.9% plus 30 cents on its paid plans. Ask Cottage CMS which applies before you budget.
If you are considering Pro, their own page says full access is moving up in August 2026 and encourages starting Pro before launch to keep today's set. Waiting means buying into the new structure. Buying now means depending on grandfathering that is conditional on staying active. Get the terms in writing either way.
If you sell for pickup and can live on a subdomain, Cottage CMS Free is the answer and you should not spend another minute on this. A free tier with pre-orders and scheduling is a genuinely good offer and there is nothing to argue with.
The moment you need delivery or your own domain, the comparison inverts: Cottage CMS Pro is $200 a year against Bake.Shop's $149, and Bake.Shop adds inventory tracking and states its processing rate plainly. Add the August 2026 repositioning at Cottage CMS and there is a real argument for the more boring, more stable option. Whichever way you go, ask about the processing rate first, since on $18,000 of sales it is five times either subscription, and check what a different set of trade-offs looks like before committing to a year.
