The short version: Local Line is farm and food-hub commerce software. Core is $79 a month billed annually, which is $950 a year, or $99 billed monthly. Premium is $159 and Ultimate is $319, both annual. There is a 7-day free trial with no card required, no commission, and card processing that drops by tier: 2.9% plus $0.30 at Core, 2.7% at Premium, 2.5% at Ultimate, with ACH at 1.0%, 0.8%, and 0.6%. Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually or $12.50 monthly, 0% commission, 2.9% plus $0.30, a 7-day trial, and sales tax calculated and remitted in all 50 states. The gap is $830 a year at the entry tiers. Local Line earns it if you sell wholesale or take payment by bank transfer. It does not if you sell fixed-price products to people who collect them.
All figures below came off Local Line's own supplier pricing page and Homegrown's signup page in July 2026. Note that Local Line now lives at localline.co; the older locallineapp.com domain no longer resolves.
Local Line is built around selling to more than one kind of buyer. Homegrown is built around selling to one kind, well.
Local Line's tiers are gated on price lists and vendor seats. Core gives you 2 price lists and 5 vendors, Premium 5 and 10, Ultimate 10 and 50. That structure tells you exactly who it is for: a farm quoting different prices to a restaurant, a co-op, and a direct customer, or a hub aggregating several producers under one storefront.
Homegrown has one price list and one vendor: you. There are no tiers to grow through and nothing to configure about buyer segments, because it assumes you sell the same things at the same prices to whoever turns up.
The other structural difference is what happens to your processing rate as you grow. Local Line rewards volume with lower rates. Homegrown has one rate at one price.
Local Line is priced for farms with wholesale accounts and price lists; if your operation is one person and a market table, that difference is the entire comparison. A trial on the smaller tool tells you whether you are missing anything.
Same four disclosures on every tier.
| Homegrown | Local Line Core | Local Line Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $10/mo billed annually, or $12.50/mo billed monthly | $79/mo billed annually ($950/yr), $99/mo billed monthly | $159/mo billed annually ($1,920/yr) |
| Free trial | 7-day free trial, nothing charged until day eight | 7-day free trial, no credit card required | 7-day free trial, no credit card required |
| Platform fee | $0, 0% commission | $0, no commissions, no setup fees | $0 |
| Card processing | 2.9% + $0.30 | 2.9% + $0.30, ACH 1.0% | 2.7% + $0.30, ACH 0.8% |
Ultimate is $319 a month billed annually, with card at 2.5% plus $0.30 and ACH at 0.6%.
Two things Local Line does better than most of this category, and they are worth saying plainly. It publishes every tier and every rate, card and ACH, which several farm platforms do not. And there is no setup fee, which is a meaningful difference from at least one direct competitor.
Take a farm doing $2,000 a month across 40 orders, a $50 average order and $24,000 a year, all paid by card.
Processing at Core matches Homegrown exactly, so it cancels out:
Local Line Core, billed annually
Homegrown, billed annually
The gap is $830 a year, which is 3.5% of that farm's revenue. At $100,000 a year in sales the same subscription is 1% of revenue, and the conversation changes completely.
The gap is roughly $830 a year, which is real money at farm-stand scale and rounding error at wholesale scale. Which of those describes your revenue decides who wins this page.
Two specific situations, and they are worth checking against your own numbers rather than taking on faith.
If you take payment by ACH. Local Line's ACH rate is 1.0% at Core and 0.6% at Ultimate. A card at 2.9% plus $0.30 on a $500 wholesale invoice costs $14.80. The same payment by ACH at 1.0% costs $5.00. On $50,000 a year of wholesale paid by bank transfer, that difference is around $950, which pays the entire Core subscription by itself. If wholesale is a real part of your business, this is the strongest argument on this page and it is not close.
If you move up tiers on volume. At Premium, card processing drops to 2.7%. On $100,000 a year that saves $200 against Core's rate, which does not cover the $970 tier difference on its own but does soften it if you needed the extra price lists anyway.
What does not pay for itself is buying Core for a direct-to-consumer operation that takes every payment by card. In that case you are paying $830 a year extra for price lists and vendor seats you will never fill.
The ACH point deserves one more paragraph because it is genuinely underrated and almost nobody puts it in a comparison. Card rates are close to a floor across this whole category, since interchange is a real wholesale cost that every processor pays before adding margin. Bank transfers do not carry that cost, which is why an ACH rate can sit at 1.0% or lower without anybody losing money. The catch is that ACH only helps on payments large enough for the percentage to matter and from buyers organized enough to send one, which in practice means wholesale accounts rather than someone buying two loaves of bread. So the test is not whether a platform offers ACH. It is whether you have buyers who would use it, and how much they spend with you in a year.
Run that number before anything else in this comparison. Annual wholesale revenue paid by bank transfer, multiplied by 1.9%, is your saving against paying for the same invoices by card. If that figure clears $950, Local Line's subscription is already covered and the rest of its feature set is free. If it is zero, this entire section is irrelevant to you and the comparison comes down to the $830.
Our fuller look at Local Line for small vendors covers where that $950 floor starts to bite, and our Local Line against Barn2Door comparison is worth reading if both are on your list, since Local Line wins that one clearly on cost.
The honest bounds, and they are the same ones that apply to every farm platform in this batch: Homegrown does not sell by weight, does not do subscriptions or CSA boxes, and has no wholesale price lists. Sell-by-weight and subscriptions are on the roadmap and not live. If your business runs on any of those, Local Line does them and Homegrown does not, and no price gap changes that.
Both have a 7-day trial and neither asks for a card up front, which makes this one of the easier comparisons to settle with evidence rather than argument.
USDA's local and regional food research program is a useful frame here: the direct-marketing sector is dominated by small operations selling at markets and farm stands rather than by multi-channel wholesalers, which is exactly the population that tends to overbuy software. The 2022 Census of Agriculture tells the same story from the production side.
If your honest answer is that you are in that majority, you can put your real products on a storefront and take live orders inside a week before deciding anything.
Yes, and that is a reasonable plan rather than a compromise. Nothing about starting simple prevents you from moving to a multi-channel platform when you actually have multiple channels.
The signals that you have crossed over:
Until at least one of those has happened, the extra $830 a year is buying readiness rather than capability. Readiness is worth something, but it is worth less than most people assume when the migration itself takes an afternoon. A catalog of twenty products, a customer list, and a set of pickup locations is genuinely a few hours of work to move, and you will be moving it with real knowledge of what you need rather than a guess made before your first wholesale order existed.
There is also a version of this that runs the other way and is worth naming. A farm that buys the bigger platform early, on the theory that it will grow into it, often ends up shaped by the software: configuring price lists for buyers it does not have, maintaining vendor seats nobody is sitting in, and treating a half-used system as evidence that the business is more complicated than it is. Simple tools have a quiet advantage here, which is that they make it obvious when you have outgrown them. An expensive one you are using at a quarter of its capacity tells you nothing at all. Our comparison of e-commerce platforms for farmers covers the wider field if you want to see where each option sits.
Core is $79 a month billed annually, which is $950 a year, or $99 a month billed monthly. Premium is $159 a month and Ultimate is $319, both billed annually. There are no commissions and no setup fees, and every tier includes a 7-day free trial with no credit card required.
$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.
$830 a year at the entry tiers, since Core's card processing matches Homegrown's exactly at 2.9% plus $0.30. On a farm doing $24,000 a year, that is about 3.5% of revenue.
It depends almost entirely on whether you sell wholesale or take ACH payments. Its ACH rate of 1.0% against 2.9% on cards can pay for the subscription on its own at $50,000 a year of bank-transfer wholesale. Without that, a direct-to-consumer farm is paying for price lists and vendor seats it will not use.
Not at Core. Subscriptions and recurring orders start at Premium, which is $159 a month billed annually. Price the tier you would actually need rather than the entry tier.
Homegrown calculates, files, and remits in all 50 states, including states that exempt qualifying food. Local Line does not advertise tax filing, so plan on handling it yourself there.
Yes. Its supplier pricing now lives at localline.co, and the older locallineapp.com domain no longer resolves. If you are working from an old bookmark or an older comparison article, check you are looking at current pricing.
Local Line is a well-built, honestly priced piece of farm software, and it publishes more of its own numbers than most of its competitors do. The question is not whether it is good. It is whether you are the operation it was priced for.
If you have wholesale buyers, ACH payments, or other producers selling through you, it is worth every dollar of $950 and the ACH rate alone may cover it. If you sell fixed-price products to people who pick them up, you are paying $830 a year for machinery you will never switch on. Both trials are free and neither wants a card, so the cheapest thing you can do is run a real week on the simpler option first and write down exactly what was missing.
