The short version: MyPorch is a batch-ordering tool built specifically for cottage bakers, and its standout feature is automatic compliant label printing that generates your state's required disclaimer. Free for your first 10 orders a month, then $12/mo for Baker or $24/mo for Bakehouse, with no platform transaction fee and Stripe checkout. Homegrown is a storefront plus a local marketplace, built for every kind of small food vendor. $10/mo billed annually or $12.50 monthly, 0% commission, 2.9% + $0.30 processing, sales tax calculated and remitted in all 50 states, pickup and delivery, and a 7-day trial. The subscriptions land within a couple of dollars. What differs is who finds you and what the tool covers. All MyPorch figures below came off myporch.app in August 2026.
MyPorch is a production tool. You open a batch, set a cutoff, customers order and pay, the batch locks itself, and you print labels and a bake list. It's tightly designed around one workflow: a cottage baker doing porch pickup on a weekly rhythm. Everything on the product is shaped to that, including the branding.
Homegrown is a sales channel. You get a storefront link with your products and prices, customers check out for pickup or delivery, and you're also listed in a local marketplace where people in your area browse vendors they haven't met yet. It's built for the whole category of small local food producers, not just bakers.
The clearest way to see the difference is to ask where your next customer comes from.
On MyPorch, your next customer is someone you already reached. The tool takes an order from someone who found your link through your Instagram, a neighbor, or a market. It does that well. It does not introduce you to anyone.
On Homegrown, your next customer can also be someone browsing the marketplace for vendors near them. That's a different function, and it's the main structural difference between the two products.
Neither of these is a criticism. They're solving adjacent problems, and which one matters depends on whether your constraint right now is *handling orders* or *finding customers*.
| Homegrown | MyPorch | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | None; 7-day free trial | Free plan, up to 10 orders per calendar month |
| Subscription | $10/mo billed annually, or $12.50/mo monthly | $12/mo Baker, $24/mo Bakehouse |
| Platform fee | $0, 0% commission | None |
| Card processing | 2.9% + $0.30 | Stripe Connect; rate not published on their pricing page |
| Sales tax | Calculated and remitted in all 50 states | Not listed as a feature |
Three things worth pulling out of that table.
The entry price is nearly identical. $10 against $12 at the paid tier. Nobody should choose between these on subscription cost, because the annual difference is $24.
MyPorch's free plan is real and Homegrown has no equivalent. Ten orders a calendar month with no credit card is a genuinely low-risk way to test a batch workflow. Homegrown gives you seven days free and then bills. If you're at three orders a week and want to stay at zero cost indefinitely, that's a point for MyPorch and it's worth saying plainly.
Processing is the number to check yourself. Homegrown publishes 2.9% + $0.30. MyPorch routes payments through Stripe Connect and doesn't publish a rate on its pricing page, so the number you'll actually pay depends on the Stripe arrangement, and Stripe's published pricing is the place to confirm it. On any platform, processing is usually the larger of the two costs once you're past a few hundred dollars a month, which is why it's worth more attention than the subscription line. The Federal Reserve's published average interchange fees explain why roughly 2.9% keeps appearing as the industry floor: interchange is the wholesale cost before any processor margin.
Some features sit at MyPorch's higher tier. SMS reminders, custom domain support, and advanced storefront analytics are Bakehouse at $24, not Baker at $12. If any of those are non-negotiable for you, the honest comparison is $24 against $10, not $12 against $10.
Three things, stated straight.
Automatic compliant label printing. This is their real differentiator and it's a good one. MyPorch generates cottage food labels that include your state's required disclaimer, the ingredient list, allergens, and net weight, printed from the same place your orders live. It also snapshots the label at order time, so a later recipe change doesn't retroactively alter your compliance record. If you've been maintaining labels in a Word document and updating them by hand every time you switch a butter brand, that's a real, recurring annoyance solved.
If labels are the thing eating your Friday nights, weigh that seriously. Our own coverage of what belongs on a label is in the cottage food label checklist, and the state-by-state disclaimer wording lives in each state's cottage food guide, but reading a checklist and having labels generate themselves are different amounts of work.
A free tier that isn't a trial. Ten orders a month at $0, indefinitely. For someone testing whether they want a business at all, that's a genuinely lower-commitment starting point.
Tighter focus. MyPorch is built for one customer: a cottage baker doing weekly porch pickup. Everything from the batch cutoff to the bake list assumes that rhythm. A tool built for one workflow usually fits that workflow better than a tool built for six, and if you're exactly that baker, the focus will feel like a fit.
The marketplace. Homegrown lists you where nearby customers browse for local vendors. That's a customer acquisition channel, not just an order-taking tool, and it's the difference that compounds. A storefront link only works on people you already reached; a marketplace listing works on people who haven't met you. MyPorch has no equivalent.
Sales tax in all 50 states. Homegrown calculates and remits it. For most home bakers this sounds like a non-issue right up until they learn their state taxes prepared food and they've been selling for eight months without collecting it. That's the kind of problem that's cheap to prevent and expensive to fix, and it's covered in do I need a business license for cottage food.
Pickup and delivery. MyPorch's whole design centers on a pickup window. Homegrown handles both, which matters if your city restricts customer traffic at a residential address, a genuinely common zoning constraint. See the cottage food delivery playbook.
It isn't only for bakers. If you sell jam, honey, soap, salsa, produce, prepared meals, or a mix of things, MyPorch's product and branding aren't built for you. Homegrown serves the full range of small local food producers, which also matters if your product line drifts over time, as most do.
No ceiling on the plan. Homegrown's $10 tier is the product. There's no analytics tier or SMS tier to graduate into.
Because MyPorch's free plan caps at 10 orders per calendar month, the crossover point is worth doing explicitly.
Under 10 orders a month. MyPorch free is $0 and Homegrown is $120 a year. MyPorch wins on cost, unambiguously. The counter-argument is that at that volume your problem is almost certainly customer acquisition rather than order management, which is the thing a marketplace listing addresses and a free order tool doesn't.
10 to 40 orders a month. MyPorch Baker is $144 a year, Homegrown annual is $120. Effectively a tie on subscription, so decide on function: labels versus discovery and sales tax.
Above 40 orders a month. Both are flat, so neither penalizes growth, which is the main thing to check on any platform. Compare processing rates and whether you've moved into MyPorch's $24 tier for SMS or a custom domain.
Worth noting what neither platform does: take a percentage. Both are flat-fee, which puts them in a different category from the fee-based platforms. If you're comparing against those, hotplate alternatives and what 5% platform fees cost at $2k a month do that math.
Subscription tables hide the real number, so here it is worked through on a realistic baker: $1,200 a month across 30 orders, a $40 average order, $14,400 a year.
MyPorch Baker, assuming Stripe's standard published rate
MyPorch Bakehouse (if you want SMS reminders or a custom domain)
Homegrown, billed annually
The gap between Homegrown and MyPorch Baker is $24 for the year. Against Bakehouse it's $168. Both are small enough that cost is the wrong axis to decide on, which is genuinely the useful finding here: pick on function.
One caveat on that math. MyPorch doesn't publish a processing rate on its pricing page, so the figures above assume Stripe's standard published rate. If the actual arrangement differs, the number moves, and it moves more than the subscription line does. At $14,400 a year, a single percentage point of processing is $144, which is more than the entire subscription difference. Confirm the rate before you decide, on either platform.
The same arithmetic is why both of these beat a percentage-fee platform at any real volume. A 5% platform fee on that same $14,400 is $720 a year on its own, before processing and before any subscription. Flat-fee pricing is the structural advantage both MyPorch and Homegrown share, and it's the thing that matters most as you grow.
Skip the feature grid and answer three questions.
1. What's your bottleneck right now?
If you have more demand than you can handle and the pain is coordination, chasing payments, and Friday night labels, MyPorch is aimed squarely at that. If you can bake more than you're selling and the pain is that not enough people know you exist, an order tool won't fix it and a marketplace listing might.
This is the question that decides it for most people, and it's worth being honest about, because "I need a better system" is a more comfortable diagnosis than "I need more customers."
2. Do you sell only baked goods, and only by pickup?
If yes, MyPorch's focus works in your favor. If you sell a mix of products, or you deliver, or you expect to add something that isn't bread, the narrower tool becomes a constraint.
3. How much is label automation worth to you?
Be specific. Time yourself building and printing a week of labels. If it's twenty minutes, automating it saves you seventeen hours a year. If it's ninety minutes because you rebuild them every time a recipe shifts, it's a much bigger number and it should weigh heavily.
Both platforms make this cheap. MyPorch's free plan takes 10 orders a month with no card. Homegrown's trial is seven days.
The test worth running on either: put five real products up, send the link to three regulars, and count how many orders arrive without a single message exchanged. That single number tells you more than any comparison table, including this one, because it measures the thing that actually changes your week.
For Homegrown, one additional test: after a couple of weeks, check whether any orders came from people you didn't send the link to. That's the marketplace working or not working, and it's the variable this comparison actually turns on.
They're within a couple of dollars a month at the paid tier: Homegrown is $10 billed annually or $12.50 monthly, MyPorch Baker is $12. MyPorch is cheaper below 10 orders a month because its free plan covers that, and more expensive if you need SMS reminders, a custom domain, or analytics, which sit on its $24 Bakehouse tier. Neither takes a percentage of sales.
No. MyPorch states it charges no platform transaction fee on any plan. Homegrown also takes 0% commission. On both, you'll still pay card processing, which is the larger cost at any real volume, so that's the number to compare carefully.
No. Automatic compliant label generation is MyPorch's genuine advantage and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Homegrown gives you an accurate bake and order list to build labels from, and our label checklist covers every required element, but you're producing the labels yourself.
No. MyPorch gives you a hosted storefront that works on customers you send there. Homegrown includes a local marketplace listing where nearby customers browse vendors, which is a customer acquisition channel rather than an ordering tool. That's the largest structural difference between the two.
The product and its entire design center on cottage bakers, from the batch-and-pickup workflow to the branding. If you sell jam, soap, honey, salsa, produce, or prepared meals, it isn't built for you. Homegrown serves the full range of small local food producers.
Homegrown calculates and remits sales tax in all 50 states. MyPorch doesn't list sales tax handling as a feature on its pricing page. Whether that matters depends on your state and your products, and it's worth confirming with your Department of Revenue before it becomes a back-tax problem rather than a setup question.
Yes, on either, and the thing to protect when you do is your customer list. Export it before you move, and know what each platform lets you take with you. See how to export your customer list before switching and how to tell customers you changed ordering platforms.
If you're a cottage baker doing weekly porch pickup, your orders are already coming in, and labels are the recurring annoyance, MyPorch is built for exactly you and its label automation is a real advantage. Its free tier makes trying it nearly costless.
If your constraint is that not enough people know you exist, if you sell more than baked goods, if you deliver as well as hand off, or if sales tax is a question you'd rather have answered, Homegrown covers ground MyPorch doesn't.
The subscription difference is $24 a year, which is small enough that you should decide on function rather than price. Start a Homegrown storefront for a 7-day trial, or read how to start a home bakery if you're still setting the business up.
*Figures for both platforms were taken from each company's own published pages in August 2026. Pricing changes; verify before deciding.*
