The short version: Bakesy is $9.99 a month for Standard or $17.99 for Premium, with a 30-day free trial and 0% commission. The plan choice is worth $96 a year. The far bigger decision is payments: Bakesy Secure Payments charges 3.9% plus $0.30, which at $1,000 a month costs $612 a year, and it is optional. You can arrange Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, or Cash App yourself and Bakesy takes nothing. That makes Standard with self-arranged payment about $120 a year all-in, and Standard with card checkout about $732. Everything else on this page is smaller than that gap.
Figures came from Bakesy's own pricing and payments pages in July 2026.
Two plans and an optional payments layer that dwarfs both.
| Bakesy | |
|---|---|
| Subscription | $9.99/mo Standard · $17.99/mo Premium. Monthly only on the published pricing page |
| Free trial | 30 days free |
| Platform fee | $0. Bakesy takes no commission on sales |
| Card processing | 3.9% + $0.30 via Bakesy Secure Payments, which is optional. Arrange Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, or Cash App yourself and Bakesy charges nothing |
That 30-day trial is the longest in this category by a wide margin. Bake.Shop gives 14 days, Big Cartel 7, and Shopify 3.
Six things, for $8 a month or $96 a year.
Two of those can pay for themselves and four are convenience.
Tipping is the one to run the numbers on. Premium costs $8 a month more. On $1,000 a month in orders, tips only need to average 0.8% of revenue to cover the upgrade. That is a very low bar: even a small share of customers adding a couple of dollars clears it. If your customers collect in person and know you by name, tipping tends to perform better than vendors expect.
Instant checkout is the other. A shorter path to payment converts better, and on $1,000 a month you need roughly a 0.8% lift in completed orders to justify $8. Whether you get it depends on your customers, but it is a plausible return rather than a hopeful one.
Bakesy's other four Premium items, the dashboard, inventory tracking, discount codes, and logo removal, are worth having but will not pay for themselves. Buy Premium for tipping and checkout. If those two do not apply to how you sell, Standard is the right plan.
It is a full percentage point above the industry-standard 2.9%, and at real volume that gap is larger than the entire subscription.
At $1,000 a month across 40 orders:
That one-point difference costs $120 a year, which is more than the entire $9.99 Standard subscription. At $3,000 a month it is $360 a year.
So the honest framing is that Bakesy's subscription is cheap and its optional card processing is not. Whether that matters depends entirely on the next question.
Two things in Bakesy's defence, because a bare rate comparison is not the whole picture. The rate is published plainly, on a page that also says the service is optional, which is more candour than several competitors manage. And a platform that processes payments carries risk the vendor never sees: fraud, chargebacks, and the cost of moving money. Whether a full point above the standard is the right price for that is a judgement, but it is not an unexplained one.
What it does mean is that the $9.99 headline is not the price of using Bakesy with card checkout. That price is closer to $61 a month at $1,000 in sales, and comparing it against a $19 competitor on subscription alone gets the answer backwards.
This is the real decision on this page, and it is worth $612 a year at $1,000 a month.
Bakesy Secure Payments gives you card checkout inside the order flow: the customer pays when they order, you do not chase anyone, and the money arrives without you doing anything. You pay 3.9% plus 30¢ for that.
Self-arranged payment through Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, or Cash App costs you nothing on Bakesy's side. What it costs is your time and your certainty. You send a request, you check whether it arrived, and you follow up on the ones that did not. Some of those apps also charge business accounts their own fees, so "free" depends on which one and how you use it.
The trade is straightforward:
At $1,000 a month across 40 orders, that $612 works out to about $1.28 per order of admin you are being paid to do. If chasing a payment takes you two minutes, you are earning roughly $38 an hour to do it, which is a genuinely good rate for most small food businesses. At 200 orders a month, the same maths gives you $255 a month for a job that now takes hours and generates real no-shows.
So the answer scales. Small and steady: arrange your own and keep the money. Growing, or already spending Sunday mornings reconciling payments: pay the 3.9% and get your time back.
Our comparison of Venmo, Square, and Stripe for food sellers covers what each self-arranged option actually costs, and our guide to using Venmo and Cash App for a food business legally covers the part people skip.
Worth being specific, because the $612 saving is real and so are the costs.
The CFPB's guidance on prepaid and stored-value products is a useful plain-language reference for the same question, since money sitting in a payment app behaves differently from money in a checking account in ways that matter if anything goes wrong.
Worth naming, because the pricing only makes sense once you know.
Bakesy is a custom-order tool, not a storefront and not a marketplace. It is built for the baker taking enquiries for celebration cakes: a customer describes what they want, you quote, they accept, and the order is tracked through to collection. That is a genuinely different job from listing six products and letting people buy.
Which explains the pricing. A custom-order business has fewer, larger orders, so a $9.99 subscription with optional payment collection fits the shape well. A vendor doing 200 small transactions a week is a different business, and Bakesy's 3.9% would hurt in a way it does not for someone taking twelve cake orders a month.
Twelve orders at $80 is $960 a month. Bakesy Secure Payments on that is $37 plus $3.60, about $41 a month. The same revenue across 40 orders of $24 costs $37 plus $12, or $49. Fewer, larger orders suit this pricing.
A month is unusually generous and most people waste it clicking around in week one and forgetting until the reminder email.
Step three is the one worth the effort. The whole $612-a-year decision on this page rests on how long payment collection actually takes you, and you can measure that in a month rather than guessing. Run the same exercise against a storefront where card checkout is included in a flat monthly fee and you will have three real data points instead of two pricing pages.
Our full look at Bakesy for home bakers covers the product itself.
At $12,000 a year in sales across 480 orders, using each platform's own card processing:
That last line is the cheapest number in this entire category, and it is real. It just moves the payment collection onto you.
Bake.Shop beats Bakesy by $91 a year on card processing despite a higher subscription, because a one-point rate difference outweighs $29 of subscription above about $2,900 in annual sales. Our Bakesy vs Bake.Shop comparison works that through, and Bakesy vs Cottage CMS covers the free-tier option.
The sales tax point is the expensive one. It is a recurring quarterly obligation no $120-a-year subscription removes, and doing it by hand costs hours every cycle rather than dollars once.
If that is the work you are trying to stop doing, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: it is a storefront, not a custom-order quoting tool. Homegrown does not have an enquiry-to-quote flow, does not offer tipping, does not have any discount or promo-code mechanic, and does not ship nationally. If your business is bespoke cakes priced per enquiry, Bakesy is built for that in a way a product storefront is not. You can put a month of orders through both during Bakesy's 30-day trial and compare on your own numbers.
Standard is $9.99 a month and Premium is $17.99, with a 30-day free trial. Bakesy takes no commission on sales. Card processing through Bakesy Secure Payments is 3.9% plus $0.30 and is optional.
If you want tipping or instant checkout, yes. The $8 monthly difference is covered by tips averaging 0.8% of revenue at $1,000 a month, which is a low bar. If neither applies to how you sell, Standard is the right plan.
No. Bakesy Secure Payments is optional, and you can arrange Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, or Cash App yourself at no cost from Bakesy. Those services may charge their own fees depending on account type.
That is the rate published for Bakesy Secure Payments, a full point above the common 2.9% standard. At $1,000 a month it costs $120 a year more than a 2.9% processor, which is more than the Standard subscription.
At $1,000 a month it saves $612 a year, or about $1.28 per order of admin. That is worth doing at low volume. As orders grow, the chasing and the no-shows usually outweigh the saving.
30 days, the longest in this category. Use it on a real order cycle rather than a quiet week, and load your actual products and prices rather than placeholders.
No. It is a custom-order management tool, so nobody browses it looking for a baker. You bring your own customers, which means it is a conversion and admin tool rather than a source of demand.
Bakesy's plan decision is small: $96 a year, and worth paying if tipping or instant checkout fit how you sell. Tips only need to reach 0.8% of revenue to cover it.
The decision that actually matters is payments. Bakesy Secure Payments costs 3.9% plus 30¢, which is $612 a year at $1,000 a month, and it is optional. Collecting through Venmo or Zelle yourself brings your all-in cost to about $120 a year, the cheapest real number in this category, in exchange for chasing people and absorbing the occasional no-show.
Work it out per order rather than per year. At $1,000 a month you are being paid about $1.28 an order to collect payment yourself, which is good money at forty orders and a bad job at two hundred. The right answer changes as you grow, so revisit it rather than setting it once.
