The short version: You do not need a website to sell food online. You need one link that takes money, and several platforms give you that for $0: Square Online's free plan and Cottage CMS's Free Forever tier both hand you a working store URL with no subscription and no site to build. Hotplate gives you a link per release with no subscription at all. What website builders sell is something different: pages. Squarespace and Wix are both $29 a month for a designed site with a store attached, which is $348 a year for a problem most local food vendors do not have.
All figures came from each company's own pricing pages in July 2026.
More than it sounds, and getting this wrong costs $348 a year.
A link is one page where people choose products, pay, and pick a collection slot. It has a URL you can put in a bio, text to someone, or print on a bag. It does one job.
A website is a set of pages: a story, a gallery, an events list, a wholesale enquiry form, maybe a blog. It exists to persuade people who do not yet know you.
For a local food vendor whose customers arrive from Instagram, a market stall, or word of mouth, the persuading already happened. They saw the photograph, they met you, someone recommended you. What they need next is somewhere to buy, which is a link.
So the question is not "do I need a website" but "who is doing the persuading?" If it is your social account and your stall, buy a link. If you genuinely need pages to convert strangers, buy a site.
Three, and they suit different businesses.
Square Online's free plan is $0 a month with no time limit. You get a store URL, products, pickup and local delivery options, and card processing at 3.3% plus 30¢ online. Nothing expires. Our breakdown of what that free plan really costs works the 3.3% through properly, since the higher rate is how it pays for itself.
Cottage CMS's Free Forever plan is $0 with checkout through Square, and it includes pre-orders, weekly schedules, and drops. Its paid tiers are Pro at $200 a year and a Scale tier at $370 a year coming in August 2026, with the company noting that full-feature access is moving up, so ask what the free tier will include afterwards.
Hotplate has no subscription. It charges 5% plus 55¢ per order, added to your customer's total by default, plus 2.9% plus 30¢ card processing you pay. That means a link that costs you nothing until it sells something, which suits an occasional or seasonal release.
All three give you a URL. None of them gives you a website, and that is the point.
Worth noting what each free option is actually charging you instead of a subscription. Square recovers it through a higher card rate, 3.3% rather than 2.9%, which on $12,000 of annual sales is about $48 more than a 2.9% platform. Hotplate recovers it from your customers, at 5% plus 55¢ added to their total. Cottage CMS routes payments through Square and may narrow its free tier when the Scale plan arrives. None of those is hidden and all of them are worth knowing: free means the money is coming from somewhere else, and on this list that somewhere is either your margin or your customer's bill.
Not a website, mostly. Better ordering.
Those are $120 to $149 a year for a link that takes money, and what the money buys over the free options is generally lower processing, better ordering rules, or specific capability rather than design.
Compare that to Squarespace Core or Wix Core at $29 a month, $348 a year. That extra roughly $200 is buying pages: templates, galleries, a blog, a designed home page. Our Squarespace versus Wix comparison covers that side properly, and both are genuinely good at it.
The question is just whether you need pages. Most local vendors do not, and buy them anyway because "you need a website" is received wisdom rather than analysis.
Worth separating, because these look like the answer and only do half the job.
A link-in-bio page lists your links. It does not take orders and does not take money. So the setup becomes: bio link, to a list of links, to an ordering page. That is one extra step between wanting to buy and buying, and steps cost conversions.
Our comparison of Linktree against a storefront covers when the extra layer is worth it. Put simply: if you have one thing you want people to do, link straight to it. A link-in-bio page earns its place when you genuinely have several destinations, such as a store, a market schedule, and a wholesale enquiry form.
For most food vendors, the highest-converting bio link is the ordering page itself.
Six things, and they matter more than which platform you picked.
Point three is where link-only setups either work or fail. Without pages to build trust, the product photographs carry the whole load, and a phone snap on a cluttered worktop is genuinely costing you orders. An hour with daylight and a plain background is the highest-return work available to a vendor without a website.
Point six is the one nobody does consistently. A customer who bought from you at a market and left with your link in a text message is worth several who saw a post. If your current setup makes that awkward, a storefront with a clean shareable link fixes it for less than the cost of a website.
Somewhat, and it is worth being honest about the trade rather than pretending it is free.
A storefront page can rank, and a business name search will usually find it. What you give up without pages is the ability to rank for the things people search before they know you exist: a product plus a place, a question about your kind of food, a comparison.
Whether that matters depends on where your customers come from:
The middle case is the one people miss. A complete Google Business Profile is free and outperforms a small website for local discovery, because someone searching "sourdough near me" is served by a map result rather than by your About page. Set that up before paying anyone for a site.
Our comparison of selling on Instagram versus Facebook versus a website covers where each channel actually delivers, and our piece on websites versus marketplaces versus order forms covers the wider decision.
Five things, and none of them is a home page.
That last one is worth doing properly before you print anything. The USPTO's trademark basics covers how to search existing marks and what registration protects, and discovering a conflict two years in is considerably more expensive than an hour of searching now.
If you are still deciding how the business is structured, the SBA's guide to choosing a business structure covers what that decision affects, and it interacts with your name and your registered address.
There are real cases, and they are more specific than "to look professional."
If none of those apply, the honest answer is that a $348-a-year website builder is buying you a home page nobody reads on the way to a checkout they came for anyway.
There is a sequencing argument too, and it is the one worth acting on. Start with the link. Add the site when something forces you to. Nothing about beginning with a $0 store makes a website harder later: your products, your photographs, and your customer list all move, and you will know by then which pages you actually need rather than guessing at a template.
The reverse order is what costs money. A vendor who buys a website builder first spends an evening choosing fonts, another on a home page, and launches three weeks later than someone who put six products behind a link on a Tuesday night. Those three weeks are orders, and the fonts were never the constraint.
Our guide to selling food on your own website without Shopify covers the case where you do want one, and Etsy versus your own website covers the discovery trade-off.
For a link that takes orders with local pickup and delivery, 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, and they are the whole point of this article: it is not a website builder. There are no templates, no blog, no galleries, no pages to design, and it does not ship nationally. If you want a site that persuades strangers, Squarespace or Wix at $29 a month is the right purchase and this is not. If you want one link that takes money and knows which market someone is collecting from, you can set it up in a trial in an evening.
Every platform below shows the same four commercial facts, because a table that lists one platform's transaction fee and not another's is not a comparison. "Not published" means exactly that: the company does not state it publicly.
| Platform | Works as a standalone link | Subscription (annual) | Free trial | Platform fee | Card processing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homegrown | A storefront link, no site to build | $10/mo billed annually | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee (0% commission) | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Cococart | One ordering page from a link | $19/mo store, $59 Pro | 7-day free trial | Platform fee not published | Processing not published |
| Hotplate | Drop page, link-first | $0 | n/a | 5% + $0.55 platform fee, added to the customer | 2.9% + $0.30 processing (vendor) |
| Bakesy | Order form via the app | $9.99/mo Standard (monthly only) | 30-day free trial | $0 platform fee | 3.9% + $0.30 processing, optional |
| Big Cartel | A store, but you still design it | Platinum $12/mo ($144/yr) | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee | Your own provider, so 2.9% + $0.30 typical |
| Squarespace | You are building a website by design | $19/mo Basic | 14-day free trial | 2% platform fee on Basic | from 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
Yes. You need a link that takes payment, not a site. Square Online's free plan and Cottage CMS's Free Forever tier both give you a working store URL at $0, and Hotplate gives you one with no subscription at all.
Square Online's free plan at $0 a month, paying 3.3% plus 30¢ in card processing. Cottage CMS's free tier is also $0 with Square checkout, and includes pre-orders and weekly schedules.
Not on its own, since it lists links rather than taking orders or payment. It adds a step between wanting to buy and buying. If you have one thing you want people to do, link straight to the ordering page.
A clean ordering page with good photographs and clear ingredients looks more professional than a thin website with a store bolted on. Customers judge the buying experience, not the number of pages.
You give up ranking for searches beyond your own name. For local discovery, a complete Google Business Profile is free and generally does more than a small website, so set that up before paying for pages.
When you need to rank for content, sell wholesale to buyers who will look you up, run events or classes, or build a national brand. If none of those apply, you are buying pages nobody reads on the way to a checkout.
Real photographs, full ingredients and allergens, collection or delivery details with cutoffs, and prices with any fees stated. That covers the questions customers would otherwise message you about.
"You need a website" is advice for businesses that need to persuade strangers. A local food vendor whose customers come from Instagram, a market, or a recommendation has already done the persuading. What they need is one link that takes money.
That link costs $0 on Square Online's free plan or Cottage CMS's free tier, nothing until it sells on Hotplate, or $120 to $149 a year on the paid ordering platforms, which buy you better ordering rules rather than better design.
A website builder at $348 a year buys pages. Pages are worth it when you need to rank for content, sell wholesale, or build something national. If you are not doing one of those, spend an hour on a free Google Business Profile instead and put the $200 difference into ingredients.
