The short version: Both of these run timed pre-order drops, which is the thing most people do not realize. Hotplate is the specialist: no subscription at all, with 5% plus $0.55 added to your customer's checkout total by default, while you separately pay 2.9% plus $0.30 in card processing. Cottage CMS puts pre-orders, which it also calls Drops, and weekly schedules on its Free Forever plan at $0, with Square-powered checkout and no customer-facing fee. So the real question is not whether you can run a drop for free. You can. It is whether Hotplate's countdown timers, waitlists, inventory reservation, and SMS reminders are worth adding 7.75% to what your customers pay.
All figures came off each company's own pages in July 2026. Cottage CMS is changing its tiers in August 2026, covered below.
They overlap more than their positioning suggests, and diverge sharply on who pays.
Hotplate is built around the drop and nothing else. A release window with a countdown, inventory reservation, waitlists, prep lists, order tickets, automatic SMS alerts, a built-in inbox, reviews, a loyalty program, and discount codes. There is no subscription, no setup cost, and no contract. It is a focused product and the focus shows.
Cottage CMS is a storefront that includes drops. Its free tier gives you pre-orders and weekly schedules alongside a public storefront, a product catalog, order forms, and customer records. Pro at $200 a year adds a custom domain, delivery and shipping options, QR codes, text messaging, blog posts, and digital products.
The structural difference:
Same four disclosures on all three columns.
| Hotplate | Cottage CMS Free | Cottage CMS Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $0, no plan to buy | $0 forever, no credit card | $200/yr, which is $16.67/mo billed annually |
| Free trial | None needed, nothing to subscribe to | Not needed, it is free | 30-day money-back guarantee |
| Platform fee | 5% + $0.55, added to the customer's subtotal by default | Not stated | Not stated |
| Card processing | 2.9% + $0.30, paid by you | Square's rate, not restated by Cottage CMS | Square's rate |
Two clarifications that matter.
Hotplate's fee lands on your customer unless you choose otherwise. Its own pricing page works a $30 order: the customer sees a $2.05 fee added at checkout, and you separately pay $1.27 in processing. You can absorb it instead, which is a real option with a real cost.
Cottage CMS does not restate the Square rate. Square charges 3.3% plus 30 cents online on its free plan and 2.9% plus 30 cents on its paid plans. Which applies to a Cottage CMS storefront is a question worth asking, because the difference is $72 a year on $18,000 in sales.
Take a vendor doing $1,000 a month across 50 orders, a $20 average order.
Hotplate, fee passed to the customer
Hotplate, you absorb the fee
Cottage CMS Free, at Square's 2.9% + $0.30
Cottage CMS Free, at Square's free-plan 3.3% + $0.30
That comparison is the whole article. Hotplate with the fee passed on and Cottage CMS Free cost you the same $44 a month. The difference is that on one of them your customers pay $77.50 more and on the other they do not.
If you absorb Hotplate's fee to keep prices level, you are paying $121.50 against $44, a difference of $930 a year.
It is worth being fair here, because Hotplate's drop tooling is genuinely better and the fee is not arbitrary.
Included on Hotplate and not on Cottage CMS Free:
The SMS point is the strongest. A text to your list before a drop opens does more for a release than almost anything else, and on Cottage CMS texting sits on Pro at $200 a year. If SMS is central to how you sell, that changes the comparison from free-against-fee to $200-against-fee.
Our fuller Hotplate review and alternatives covers the model in more detail.
Our breakdown of what the Cottage CMS free plan leaves out covers the tier boundary, and our Cottage CMS alternatives piece covers the field around it.
This is the decision that determines Hotplate's real cost, and most vendors make it by default rather than deliberately.
Arguments for passing it on:
Arguments for absorbing it:
The honest position is that nobody can tell you which applies to your buyers, and it is genuinely testable: run one drop each way and compare conversion. Keep the test clean by holding everything else constant, same day of week, same products, same notice period, because a drop that underperforms for weather or a holiday will get blamed on the fee. Two drops each way is better than one if you can spare the cycles, since single-drop results in a small business are mostly noise. If the difference is real it will be obvious, and if it is not, you have learned that you can keep the $930 a year. You can also price the same orders against a flat-fee storefront while you are running the test, which gives you a third data point for nothing. The FTC's guidance on advertising and marketing is worth reading on how prices and added fees should be presented, since the rules about disclosure apply to you as the seller regardless of which platform adds the line.
For context on why percentage-based costs are so consistently underestimated, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's material on credit cards makes the general point well: the number that hurts is never the rate, it is the rate multiplied by a year of transactions.
Worth knowing before you commit to Pro. Cottage CMS is launching a Scale tier at $370 a year, and its own page states that full-feature access is moving up, encouraging sellers to start Pro before launch to keep today's feature set while their membership stays active.
If you were going to buy Pro for the SMS or delivery, the timing matters. Confirm the grandfathering terms directly, and note that the condition is an active membership, so a lapsed card could reset you onto the new structure.
If those are your recurring chores rather than drop mechanics, the comparison you want is different. Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it does file and remit sales tax in all 50 states, run local delivery with a radius and a route, handle pickup at several locations, and hide a home address until purchase. The honest bound: it does not have drop windows, countdowns, hard quantity caps, or SMS, all of which are the entire point of Hotplate. Drops are listed as in development and are not live. If timed releases are your model, Hotplate does something Homegrown cannot. You can test which set of chores matters more in a week without changing anything. Our guide to running a weekly food drop covers the model itself, independent of tool.
There is no subscription and no setup cost, so it is free to start. It is not free to use. Hotplate takes 5% plus $0.55 per order, added to your customer's total by default, and you separately pay 2.9% plus $0.30 in card processing.
Yes. Pre-orders, which Cottage CMS also calls Drops, and weekly schedules are included on its Free Forever plan at $0. What it does not include at that tier are countdown timers, waitlists, hard inventory reservation, or SMS alerts, which are Hotplate's specialities.
They cost the same to you, about $44 a month at $1,000 in monthly sales, if you pass Hotplate's fee to your customers. The difference is that your customers then pay $77.50 more. If you absorb the fee instead, Cottage CMS Free is about $930 a year cheaper.
Whatever Square charges your account: 3.3% plus 30 cents online on Square's free plan, or 2.9% plus 30 cents on its paid plans. Cottage CMS does not restate the rate, so ask which applies before budgeting.
Hotplate. Inventory reservation, waitlists, and a live demand display are built for exactly that, and Cottage CMS does not advertise hard quantity caps. If a release must stop at an exact number, that is Hotplate's job.
Hotplate includes automatic SMS alerts and reminders. On Cottage CMS, text messaging is a Pro feature at $200 a year. If SMS is central to how your drops perform, price that in rather than comparing free against a fee.
It is genuinely testable and worth testing. Passing it on keeps your cost at processing only; absorbing it costs about $930 a year at $1,000 a month in sales. Run one drop each way and compare conversion before deciding permanently.
The thing worth knowing before you compare these is that you do not have to pay a percentage to run a drop. Cottage CMS puts pre-orders and weekly schedules on a permanently free tier, and if your releases do not reliably sell out, that may be all you need.
What Hotplate sells is the machinery that makes a drop feel like an event: a countdown, a waitlist, reserved inventory, and a text that lands before the window opens. That is real, it works, and it costs 7.75% on your customer's bill or roughly $930 a year on yours.
So run the test in that order. Try a free drop first, see whether anything is missing, and only then decide whether urgency mechanics are worth a percentage. If they are, Hotplate is the right tool and the fee is honest. If your drops were never going to sell out anyway, you would be paying for scarcity you do not have.
