The best platform to sell sourdough in Florida for most home bakers is Homegrown — a $10 per month flat storefront that handles online pre-orders, multiple pickup locations, and the everyday workflow of a Florida cottage food operation without taking a percentage of every loaf you sell. Florida's cottage food law is among the most permissive in the country (up to $250,000 in annual gross sales without a commercial kitchen), which means the bottleneck for most Florida sourdough bakers isn't legal — it's tooling. Most start with Instagram DMs and Venmo, hit the limit of that workflow somewhere around their thirtieth weekly customer, and start looking for a real platform. The cheapest, most pickup-optimized, most "matches what a Florida sourdough baker actually needs" option is Homegrown.
The short version: Florida's cottage food law (Fla. Stat. § 500.80) allows direct-to-consumer sales of cottage food up to $250,000 annually without commercial kitchen requirements, with sourdough explicitly permitted. Platform choices for selling online: Homegrown ($10/mo annual, marketplace, multi-pickup), Hotplate (drop-focused, customer-paid surcharge), Castiron (free starter, 4-10% per sale), Square Online (generic e-commerce), and Etsy (10%+ in fees). For most Florida sourdough bakers running a Saturday-morning drop or porch pickup, Homegrown is the simplest, lowest-cost path. Hotplate is competitive for vendors whose entire business is the scheduled drop UX. The other options are either too generic (Square) or too fee-heavy (Etsy) for a flat-rate sourdough operation.
Florida is one of the friendliest cottage food states in the country. Under Fla. Stat. § 500.80, administered by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, you can sell cottage food products direct to consumers without operating from a commercial kitchen. The annual gross sales cap is $250,000 — among the highest cottage food caps in the U.S.
What you can sell as cottage food in Florida (relevant to sourdough):
What you can't sell as cottage food (regardless of platform):
How sales work under the law:
The pickup-only requirement is the structural reason platform choice matters. You're not building a Shopify-style web store with shipping. You're running a "list it, customer orders it, customer picks it up" operation. Platforms designed for shipping retail are overkill. Platforms designed for pickup are the fit.
The typical Florida sourdough operation looks like this:
What that operator needs from a platform:
What that operator doesn't need:
Homegrown is built specifically for the workflow above. Pre-orders, pickup-first design, multi-location pickup support, no per-sale fees, no shopper fees.
For a baker doing 40 loaves a week at $10 each ($400/week, ~$1,720/month gross), the math is clean: $10 of subscription + ~$53 of card processing on $1,720 of sales = about $63 in platform costs per month, or about 3.7 percent of gross. That's significantly less than most alternatives at this volume.
Hotplate is purpose-built for drop selling — the workflow where you announce a drop time, customers race to claim what they want before it sells out, and pickup happens in a defined window. If your entire business is the drop UX, Hotplate is genuinely good at that one thing.
For a 40-loaf-per-week Florida baker on Hotplate's default: vendor pays $0 in subscription, customer absorbs ~$92/month in fees on $1,720 of orders. The vendor-side cost is zero. The customer-side surcharge is 5.4 percent on top of the listed price. Whether that matters depends on whether your customers care about clean pricing.
Note: Castiron closed in late 2025; this section reflects the platform while it was operational. Castiron offered a free starter tier and paid tiers ($19/mo+) with reduced takerate. The free tier is reasonable for absolute beginners running fewer than ~15 orders per month.
At higher volumes, the per-sale fees compound. At 40 loaves a week ($1,720/month gross), a 6 percent takerate is roughly $103/month in platform fees — substantially more than Homegrown's flat $10/mo. Castiron was best as a first-toe-in-the-water tool, less competitive at sustained volume.
Square Online is a generic e-commerce builder. Cheap on the subscription side, but it's not designed for pickup-first cottage food workflows. You can configure it for pickup, but the friction is real — customer-facing checkout reads like a shipping-first store, and the configuration overhead for multi-pickup with time-window selection is non-trivial.
For Florida sourdough bakers who specifically want a Square ecosystem (because they also use Square for in-person card processing at markets), Square Online is workable. For everyone else, the configuration cost outweighs the subscription savings.
Etsy is fundamentally a craft and shipping marketplace. It's not the right tool for a pickup-first sourdough operation. Sellers report effective fee rates exceeding 10 percent of gross once listing fees, transaction fees, payment processing, and offsite ad fees stack. Etsy also has limited pickup-workflow support.
For a Florida sourdough baker, Etsy is the wrong tool unless you're shipping shelf-stable items like sourdough crackers, dried bread cubes, or starter packets. For the standard fresh-loaf-pickup operation, skip Etsy.
| Platform | Monthly | Per-Sale Fees | Pickup Support | Customer Fee at Checkout |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homegrown | $10/mo annual | None | Built for it | None |
| Hotplate | $0 | 5% + $0.55 + processing | Drop window only | ~5.4% in default |
| Castiron (closed) | Free / $19+/mo | 4-10% on paid tiers | Limited | None typically |
| Square Online | $0 | 2.6% + $0.10 | Configurable | None typically |
| Etsy | $0 listing fees | 6.5%+ stack | Limited | None typically |
Florida sourdough bakers commonly run multi-pickup workflows because of the state's market structure: Saturday morning farmers markets are widespread (Pinecrest, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Mount Dora, Winter Park, Tallahassee Downtown — all major weekly markets), Sunday outdoor markets are common, and many bakers also offer Friday or Wednesday porch pickup for customers who can't make a market.
This pattern — alternating between two or three pickup locations across the week — is where most platforms break down. Hotplate's drop-window structure assumes one pickup window per drop. Etsy and Square Online's pickup configuration handles single-location pickup decently, multi-location awkwardly. Homegrown handles multi-pickup cleanly: you set up each pickup location as its own option, customers choose at checkout, and the order flows to the right pickup list.
For a Florida baker doing Saturday morning at the Sarasota Farmers Market plus Wednesday afternoon porch pickup in their neighborhood, this matters. The platform that handles both without configuration hacks is the platform that doesn't waste your weekly admin time.
Under current Florida cottage food law (Fla. Stat. § 500.80), no registration, permit, or inspection is required for cottage food operators selling under $250,000 annually. You do need to comply with labeling requirements (operator name, address, and "Made in a cottage food operation" notice on each product). Always verify against current state guidance from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services as laws can change.
Yes. Direct-to-consumer sales at farmers markets are explicitly allowed under cottage food law. Many Florida farmers markets require operators to show cottage food labeling on each product but don't require state-level permits.
No. Florida cottage food law restricts sales to direct-to-consumer pickup or in-person delivery. You cannot ship cottage food products via USPS, FedEx, or UPS under the cottage food exemption. If you want to ship, you would need to operate from a commercial kitchen with the appropriate state food permit.
Hotplate's default fee structure passes ~5.4% of every order to the customer at checkout. Homegrown's flat $10/mo means there's no per-order customer surcharge. For the customer, the listed price is what they pay. For the vendor, the math depends on volume — at 30+ orders per month, the flat subscription works out cheaper than Hotplate's takerate-based default in customer-experience terms (the customer doesn't see a surcharge), and the vendor's effective net is similar or better.
Drops (limited-time scheduled releases with countdown timers) are shipping in M1-M2 of Homegrown's 2026 roadmap. If you absolutely need drop UX today and your business is purely drop-based, Hotplate is the only platform purpose-built for that. If you can wait a couple of months, Homegrown's drops feature plus the marketplace plus the no-customer-fee structure becomes the better long-term home.
Yes. List your sourdough loaves, sourdough crackers, granola, jams, and any other Florida cottage food products in one storefront. Customers add multiple items to one cart and pick them up at one time.
You set the pickup windows per location (e.g., "Saturdays 8am-noon at Sarasota Farmers Market, Wednesdays 4-6pm at home porch"). Customers choose their window at checkout. The system tracks who's coming when so you can prep accordingly.
Homegrown is a sales platform, not a label printer. You're responsible for printing and applying cottage food labels (operator name, address, "Made in a cottage food operation" notice) per Florida law. Most bakers print labels at home or order in bulk from Avery / Online Labels for ~$15-25 per batch.
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For most Florida sourdough bakers — the 30 to 60 loaf-per-week home operator running Saturday markets and porch pickups — Homegrown is the simplest, cheapest, most pickup-optimized platform. The state's cottage food law is permissive, the math works out cleanly at typical volumes, and the platform is structured for exactly the workflow you're already running.
Before you commit, you can see exactly what your Florida sourdough storefront would look like — paste your loaves into our free 60-second storefront preview tool and our AI rewrites them in Homegrown voice instantly. No signup needed.
Start a free 7-day Homegrown trial and have your Florida sourdough storefront live before this Saturday's market.
