The short version: At 20 orders a week, the subscription is noise and the processing is the bill. On $2,000 a month across 80 orders, card fees run about $984 a year and every credible platform sits within roughly $50 a year of the others: Square Online Free at $1,080 all-in, Homegrown at $1,104, Big Cartel at $1,128, Bake.Shop at $1,133. Only the website builders break away, at about $1,332. So stop comparing prices. At this volume the decision should be made on quantity caps, pickup scheduling, and whether you can enter an order yourself, because those are the things that will actually cost you a Saturday.
All figures came from each company's own pricing pages in July 2026.
Work it properly, because the headline prices are misleading at this scale.
Assume 80 orders a month at $25, so $2,000 a month or $24,000 a year. Card processing at a common 2.9% plus 30¢ is $82 a month, or $984 a year.
Now add each platform's subscription:
The spread between the cheapest four is $53 a year, which is a dollar a week. That is less than one order, and anyone encouraging you to agonise over it is wasting time you could spend on something that moves the business.
The two that break away do so for structural reasons: the website builders charge $348 because they include a site, and Bakesy's 3.9% adds a full point of processing. Our Bakesy pricing breakdown covers why its optional-payments model changes that number completely if you collect through Venmo or Zelle yourself.
Three habits keep that per-order number honest as you grow:
Because it scales with sales and the subscription does not.
At $24,000 a year, card fees are $984 and a typical subscription is $120 to $149. The processing is roughly seven times the subscription. So a platform that saves you $30 a year on subscription while charging half a point more in processing has cost you money.
The number that actually moves your total is the fixed fee per order, not the percentage. At $25 an order, the 30¢ is 1.2% on top of the 2.9%, giving an effective 4.1%. At $50 an order it is 0.6%, giving 3.5%.
Which means the single highest-return change available to a low-volume vendor is raising the average order value, not switching platforms. Going from a $25 average to $40 on the same 80 orders takes your effective rate from 4.1% to 3.65% and adds $1,200 a month in revenue. No platform decision comes close.
Three capabilities, and none of them appears in a price comparison.
Hard quantity caps. You can only make so much. A platform that lets 47 people order 40 items has cost you a Saturday of apologies, and at 20 orders a week you feel every one. Test it directly during any trial: set a cap of two on one product, then try to order three of them and see what the checkout does.
Pickup scheduling with cutoffs. If you sell at more than one place, or on more than one day, each needs its own deadline. A single global cutoff either blocks orders you could have taken or leaves you no prep time.
Manual order entry. At this volume a meaningful share of orders arrive by text or in person, often from your best customers. If you cannot enter one yourself, you are keeping a second list, and a second list means your stock count is wrong in both places.
Get those three right and the $53 a year is irrelevant. Get them wrong and no subscription saving compensates.
There is a fourth worth adding at this specific volume, because it only matters when you are small: how long setup takes. A platform that needs a weekend to configure is charging you in hours what it saved you in dollars. At 80 orders a month you should be selling within an evening of signing up, and if a platform cannot get you there, its feature list is compensating for the wrong thing.
Worth knowing now, because the answer decides whether today's choice survives next year.
At 20 to 40 orders a week, the thing that fails is usually the pick list. What was a readable page becomes three, and a platform that cannot group by collection point or total by item starts costing you real time on a Saturday morning.
At 40 to 60, it is capacity management. You need caps that reset per day rather than a single running stock count, and you need them to hold against orders arriving from more than one direction.
Past 60, it is the money. Processing at $2,900 a year makes half a point worth $150, and a percentage-based platform that felt generous at $24,000 becomes the largest line on your bill.
None of that argues for buying ahead of your needs. It argues for checking annually, since the cost of switching later is one evening of setup and the cost of over-buying now is real money every month. If you want to see how a platform handles the next stage before you get there, loading your full catalog into a trial and setting the caps you would need at double your volume takes twenty minutes and answers it.
Often yes at this volume, with one caveat worth knowing.
Square Online Free is $0 with no time limit and comes out cheapest on the table above, at $1,080. What you pay for that is a higher online card rate, 3.3% plus 30¢ rather than 2.9%. Our breakdown of what its free plan really costs works that through.
Cottage CMS's Free Forever plan is $0 with Square checkout and includes pre-orders, weekly schedules, and drops, which is a genuinely capable free tier. Its paid plans are $200 and $370 a year, and the company has said full-feature access is moving up, so ask what the free tier will include after its Scale launch.
The caveat: the free plans are cheapest at $24,000 a year, and the arithmetic flips as you grow. Square's 0.4-point premium costs $96 a year at $24,000 and $400 at $100,000. At some point a paid plan with a lower rate wins. Work out where that is and put it in your calendar rather than discovering it later.
Rarely at this volume, and it is worth being specific about the exception.
Squarespace Core and Wix Core are both $29 a month, or $348 a year, and both include a designed website. That is roughly $200 more than an ordering platform, and what it buys is pages rather than better ordering.
At 20 orders a week, the honest test is where your customers come from. If they arrive from Instagram, a market, or word of mouth, the persuading already happened and you are paying $200 a year for a home page they pass through. If you genuinely need to rank for content or present credibly to wholesale buyers, that is a real reason.
Our Squarespace versus Wix comparison covers that side, and our Shopify versus Big Cartel comparison covers the equivalent decision on the commerce side, where Big Cartel is half the price with no commission.
At this volume, percentage models are competitive, and that changes above it.
LocallyGrown.net charges nothing until $15,000 in sales, then 3%. On $24,000 a year that is 3% of $9,000, or $270, plus your own Stripe fees. Hotplate has no subscription and charges 5% plus 55¢ per order, added to your customer's total by default, so your own cost is just card processing.
Percentage pricing is friendliest when you are small and gets progressively worse as you grow. The crossover against a $144 flat plan is roughly $20,000 a year for a 3% model, which means at $24,000 you have just passed it.
That is the useful thing to know: you are at the volume where flat pricing starts winning. If you are on a percentage model and growing, set a reminder to re-check at the end of the season rather than letting it drift.
Hotplate is the exception worth separating out, because its fee lands on your customer rather than on you. With the fee passed on, your own cost at this volume is just card processing, about $984 a year, which makes it the cheapest option on the page from your side. Your customers pay roughly $1,728 more across the year. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on whether your buyers accept a fee at checkout, and the only honest way to find out is to run one release each way and compare conversion rather than guessing.
Worth more attention than the money, because at 20 orders a week the money is settled and the hours are not.
At two to four minutes of admin per order on a manual setup, 80 orders a month is three to five hours. Over a year that is 40 to 65 hours. Any platform that removes two thirds of that has bought back a working week, for a cost difference of $53 between the credible options.
Our guide to time management for a part-time food vendor covers where those hours actually go, and our piece on the part-time vendor advantage covers why staying at this scale is a legitimate choice rather than a stage to grow out of.
The SBA's guidance on managing your finances is a reasonable starting point for the bookkeeping side, which gets easier once orders live in one system rather than three.
Worth settling at this volume, because $24,000 a year is comfortably past the point where the question has a definite answer.
The distinction between a hobby and a business affects how income is treated, what you can deduct, and what you are expected to file. Our guide to the hobby versus business test covers the factors, and our piece on registering a DBA for a food side hustle covers the naming side.
Census Bureau data on small business statistics puts operations of this size in context: most US businesses are very small, and 20 orders a week is a real business rather than a trial run.
If your ordering is currently held together by messages and a spreadsheet, 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. At 80 orders a month that works out to about $1,104 a year all-in. The honest bounds: it does not ship nationally, there is no point-of-sale, no drop windows, and it is not a website builder. If you need any of those, other platforms on this page do them and it does not. You can run one week of real orders through a trial and check the three things that actually matter at this volume: caps, cutoffs, and whether you can enter an order yourself.
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 | Cost at roughly 20 orders a week | Subscription (annual) | Free trial | Platform fee | Card processing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homegrown | Flat fee, so cost per order falls as you grow | $10/mo billed annually | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee (0% commission) | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Hotplate | No subscription, the customer absorbs the fee | $0 | n/a | 5% + $0.55 platform fee, added to the customer | 2.9% + $0.30 processing (vendor) |
| LocallyGrown | Nothing until you pass $15,000 in sales | $0 | n/a, free to start | 3% commission after the first $15,000 | 2.9% + $0.30 processing, your own Stripe |
| Square Online | Free tier works, at the higher card rate | Free tier; paid from $29/mo per location | 30-day trial on paid plans | $0 platform fee | 3.3% + $0.30 free tier, 2.9% + $0.30 paid |
| Cottage CMS | Free tier exists, Pro is $200/yr | Free tier; Pro $200/yr | No trial needed, free tier | Platform fee not stated | Square's processing rate, not restated |
| Barn2Door | Priced far above this volume | $119/mo + $399 one-time setup | No free trial, demo only | $0 commission | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
At 80 orders a month, Square Online's free plan works out cheapest at about $1,080 a year all-in, with Homegrown, Big Cartel, and Bake.Shop within $53 of that. The website builders cost about $250 more.
Barely. At $24,000 a year in sales, card processing is around $984 and a typical subscription is $120 to $149. The processing is roughly seven times the subscription, so a cheaper plan with a higher rate costs you money.
Hard quantity caps, pickup scheduling with per-location cutoffs, and the ability to enter an order yourself. Those three decide whether the platform actually replaces your process or sits alongside it.
Usually at this volume. Square Online Free and Cottage CMS's Free Forever tier are both genuinely capable. The arithmetic flips as you grow, since Square's higher rate costs $96 a year at $24,000 and $400 at $100,000.
Raise your average order value. The 30¢ fixed fee is 1.2% on a $25 order and 0.6% on a $50 one, so moving from $25 to $40 does more for your effective rate than any platform switch.
At $24,000 a year you have just passed the crossover where flat pricing starts winning against a 3% model. If you are on one and growing, re-check at the end of the season rather than letting it drift.
Yes. At $25 an order that is $24,000 a year, which is past the point where hobby-versus-business questions have a definite answer, and worth getting your registration and bookkeeping straight for.
At 20 orders a week, every credible platform costs within about $53 a year of the others once processing is counted, because processing is roughly seven times the subscription. Price is not the decision.
Choose on the three things that will actually cost you a Saturday: hard quantity caps, pickup scheduling with per-location cutoffs, and manual order entry for the orders that arrive by text. Test all three in a trial with a real product, not a test item.
And if you want to reduce what selling costs you, raise your average order value rather than switching platforms. Going from $25 to $40 an order takes your effective rate from 4.1% to 3.65% and adds real revenue. No subscription decision on this page comes close to that.
