The short version: Bakesy is a custom-order desk. A customer fills in a form describing the cake they want, you quote it, and you send a branded invoice. It is $9.99 a month for Standard or $17.99 for Premium, with a 30-day free trial, no per-order platform fee, and card payments through Bakesy Secure Payments at 3.9% plus $0.30. Homegrown is a storefront. Someone lands on your link, picks products off a page, and checks out without messaging you. It is $10 a month billed annually or $12.50 monthly, 0% commission, 2.9% plus $0.30 processing, with sales tax calculated and remitted in all 50 states and a 7-day trial. The subscriptions are nearly identical. The products are not remotely the same thing.
All figures below came off each company's own site in July 2026.
The clearest way to see it is to picture the first thirty seconds of a customer's experience.
On Bakesy, the customer starts a conversation. They open your order form, describe an occasion, a date, a flavor, a budget, maybe upload an inspiration photo. Then they wait for you. You review, price it, and send an invoice. That is exactly right for a three-tier wedding cake and exactly wrong for someone who wants two dozen chocolate chip cookies on Friday.
On Homegrown, the customer buys. They see your products with prices, pick a pickup day or a delivery slot, pay by card, and you get an order. No quote, no back and forth, no waiting on you to be at your phone.
Which means:
The clean way to test that difference: put five real products in a trial storefront, send the link to three regulars, and count how many orders arrive without a single message exchanged.
Same four disclosures on both.
| Homegrown | Bakesy | |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $10/mo billed annually, or $12.50/mo billed monthly | $9.99/mo Standard, $17.99/mo Premium |
| Free trial | 7-day free trial, nothing charged until day eight | 30-day free trial |
| Platform fee | $0, 0% commission | $0 |
| Card processing | 2.9% + $0.30 | 3.9% + $0.30 through Bakesy Secure Payments |
On subscription these are a penny apart at the entry tier. Two things move the real number.
Bakesy's processing is a full point higher. Most online checkouts, Homegrown's included, run 2.9% plus $0.30. Bakesy's payments page states 3.9% plus $0.30 for Bakesy Secure Payments and notes that method is optional. You can take Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, or Cash App with no Bakesy fee, at the cost of reconciling payments by hand.
Bakesy's Premium tier holds a lot. Tips, instant checkout, the revenue dashboard, inventory management, automated customer reminders, calendar sync, extra shop themes, and removing the Bakesy logo from your shop and invoices are all Premium at $17.99. If any of those are non-negotiable for you, the comparison is $17.99 against $10, not $9.99 against $10.
The Federal Reserve's published average interchange fees by payment card network under Regulation II explain why 2.9% keeps showing up as the floor. Interchange is the wholesale cost the processor pays before its own margin, and a platform pricing well above it is keeping the spread.
Take a baker doing $1,500 a month across 20 orders, a $75 average order and $18,000 a year. That is a realistic mix of custom work and larger orders.
Bakesy Standard, on Bakesy Secure Payments
Bakesy Premium, on Bakesy Secure Payments
Homegrown, billed annually
The subscription gap between Homegrown and Bakesy Standard is $0.12 a year. The processing gap is $180 a year on identical sales. On any platform comparison where the monthly prices are within a dollar of each other, the processing rate is the entire decision and the headline price is a distraction.
That said, this comparison is not really about $180. It is about whether your customers should have to ask before they can buy.
For a decorated-cake business, Bakesy does things Homegrown genuinely cannot.
The honest bound on the Homegrown side is direct: Homegrown does not have custom-order request forms, quoting, or deposit schedules. Custom orders sit in the exploring stage on the Homegrown changelog and are not live. If your whole business is quoting wedding and birthday cakes, Bakesy is built for that and Homegrown is not. Our fuller look at Bakesy for cottage food sellers covers where it fits and where its Premium gate starts to bite.
That last point is worth separating from Bakesy's model. Homegrown has a messages inbox so a customer *can* ask before buying. The difference is that they do not *have* to. On a quote-first tool, the conversation is the only path.
This is the part most comparisons skip, and it matters more than the $180.
None of that is an argument against quoting for work that genuinely needs it. A custom cake should be quoted. The question is what share of your catalog genuinely needs it, and whether the rest is being dragged through the same process by default.
A rough way to size it: go back through your last thirty orders and mark each one as either priced-on-request or something you would have listed at a set price. Most bakers who do this are surprised by the split. Custom work feels like the whole business because it takes the most attention per order, but the count often runs closer to half, and the fixed-price half is the part that could have sold itself. That half is also the part most likely to grow, because it is the only part a new customer can buy without working up the nerve to message a stranger. The IRS treats income the same either way, and its guide to business expense resources is worth a read on which platform and processing costs you can deduct against both.
There is also a quieter cost in reputation. A customer who messages and waits two days for a quote on a $30 cookie box does not usually complain. They just buy from someone else next time, and you never learn why. Fixed-price items sitting behind a quote form are the easiest sales in your business to lose without noticing, and the only way to find out is to put them somewhere buyable and watch. Our guide to taking pre-orders for a food business covers how to structure that so it does not create more work than it removes.
Yes, and for a lot of bakers that is the honest answer. Run a quoting tool for custom cakes and a storefront for everything with a fixed price: cookie boxes, bread, bars, seasonal items, market leftovers.
The costs of doing that are real but small at these prices. You are paying roughly $20 a month total, maintaining two product lists, and reconciling two payout streams. Weigh that against how many fixed-price sales you currently lose because the only way to order is to message you. Our comparison of order management tools for home bakers covers how the categories fit together.
Before setting up two tools, though, do the cheap test: put your five most-ordered fixed-price items on a storefront and see how many sell without a single message. You can try that inside a 7-day trial before anything is charged. If the answer is none, your business really is quote-first and you have learned that for free.
It is worth being blunt about that last one, because it is the assumption that breaks the most first months. Neither of these tools is a demand engine. Both are ways to take an order more cleanly once someone has already decided they want what you make. If you sign up expecting a platform to introduce you to strangers, you will be disappointed by either one and blame the software for a marketing problem. The work of getting found still happens where it always has: at the market booth, in the neighborhood group, on the account where you post what came out of the oven this morning. What the right tool changes is what happens next, in the ten seconds after someone decides they want it. On a quote form, those ten seconds become a message and a wait. On a storefront, they become a paid order.
$9.99 a month for Standard or $17.99 for Premium, with a 30-day free trial. There is no per-order platform fee, but card payments through Bakesy Secure Payments run 3.9% plus $0.30.
$10 a month billed annually, or $12.50 billed monthly, with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 card processing. The trial is 7 days and nothing is charged until day eight.
At the entry tiers the subscriptions are within twelve cents a year of each other, so processing decides it. On $18,000 in annual sales, Bakesy's 3.9% costs about $180 more than Homegrown's 2.9%. If you compare against Bakesy Premium, add another $96 a year.
Not with a quoting workflow. There are no custom-order request forms, no quote-then-invoice flow, and no deposit schedules. Custom orders are listed as being explored and are not live. If that is the core of your business, use a tool built for it.
Bakesy gives you a shop page and instant checkout on Premium, but the product is organized around order forms and invoices. If you want a stranger to browse products and check out unprompted, that is a storefront's job.
Homegrown calculates and remits in all 50 states, including the states that do not tax qualifying food. Bakesy leaves sales tax to you.
Homegrown, clearly. It supports a delivery radius you set, a flat fee you keep minus card processing, a minimum order, a cap on deliveries per day, and a route to run. Bakesy does not offer a paid delivery checkout.
If every order starts as a question, use Bakesy and budget for the 3.9% or route payment around it. If your customers mostly want things you already make at prices you have already set, a quote-first tool is charging them a conversation for something that should take one tap.
The two are close enough on price that cost should not decide this. What should decide it is what happens when someone finds you at 9pm on a Tuesday and wants to buy a box of cookies. On one of these they send a message and wait. On the other they check out. You can see which one your customers actually do by putting your fixed-price items on a storefront for a week and counting.
