The short version: LocallyGrown.net charges nothing to start and 3% of completed sales after your first $15,000. Refunded and cancelled orders are not charged. You connect your own Stripe account, so the 2.9% plus 30¢ card rate goes to Stripe rather than to LocallyGrown, and the 3% sits on top of it. That free threshold is worth $450, and it is genuinely free rather than a trial. Where this pricing stops being the cheapest option is around $20,000 a year in sales, at which point a $144-a-year flat subscription costs less than the 3%.
Figures came from LocallyGrown.net's own pricing page in July 2026.
Two numbers and one unusual structural choice.
| LocallyGrown.net | |
|---|---|
| Subscription | $0. No setup cost, nothing charged monthly |
| Free trial | Not applicable. It costs nothing to start and nothing until you have sold $15,000 |
| Platform fee | 3% of completed sales, after your first $15,000 in sales. Refunded and cancelled orders are not charged |
| Card processing | 2.9% + $0.30, paid to Stripe directly through your own account, not to LocallyGrown |
The Stripe arrangement is the structural choice worth understanding. Your customers' money goes into your own Stripe account, not into a platform balance that gets paid out to you later. That is a meaningful difference in who holds your money and for how long.
The 3% only starts after your first $15,000, which makes LocallyGrown effectively free for a market finding its feet, and the break-even against flat pricing is worked below. You can price the flat-fee side against your own volume in a few minutes.
$450, and it lasts as long as it takes you to sell $15,000.
That is not a huge number in absolute terms, but the way it is structured is unusually generous. It is not 30 days, or three months, or a limited feature set. It is a real revenue threshold, which means:
So the smaller you are, the longer the free period lasts, which is exactly backwards from most trial structures and exactly right for a small operation finding its feet. A market that takes a year to get going is not penalised for it.
Stripe's 2.9% plus 30¢ still applies from your first order, because that money goes to Stripe. So "free" means free of LocallyGrown's fee rather than free of all costs, and on $15,000 across 600 orders you will still have paid Stripe roughly $615.
Around $20,000 a year in sales, depending on what you compare it against.
The arithmetic is straightforward. Once past the threshold, LocallyGrown costs 3% of everything. A flat subscription costs the same regardless of volume. So the crossover is wherever 3% of your fee-bearing sales exceeds the subscription.
Against a few real alternatives, using annual sales figures:
Worked at four volumes:
Stripe's rate applies on top of both columns identically, so it does not affect the comparison.
Which gives the honest summary: LocallyGrown is the cheapest thing available below roughly $20,000 a year and progressively the most expensive above it. Percentage pricing always works that way, and the free threshold shifts the crossover higher than most percentage models manage.
Worth putting the 3% next to the percentage models it actually competes with, rather than only against flat subscriptions. A platform charging 5% plus 55¢ per order takes $864 a year on $12,000 across 480 orders. LocallyGrown on the same sales, past the threshold, takes $360. Against marketplace rates it is cheaper still: Etsy's stack works out to around 11.3% of a $25 order.
So the ranking depends entirely on what you are comparing. Against other percentage models, 3% is at the low end and the free threshold makes it lower. Against flat subscriptions above $20,000 a year, it is expensive. Both statements are true and the pricing page can only tell you the first one. Our comparisons of Hotplate vs Etsy and Shopify vs Big Cartel work through the percentage and flat models on the retail side, where the same arithmetic applies.
Because it is a genuinely better definition than most percentage platforms use, and it is worth noticing.
LocallyGrown charges on completed sales only. Refunds and cancellations are not charged. That means:
Plenty of platforms charge on the gross transaction and keep the fee when you refund, which turns every cancellation into a small loss on top of the wasted product. For a food business with real no-show and cancellation rates, that difference adds up quietly.
Worth confirming one detail directly: whether a partial refund reduces the fee proportionally or removes it entirely. The published wording covers refunds and cancellations without specifying partials, and it is a two-minute question.
Put a number on why it matters. A market with $30,000 of annual sales and a 5% cancellation rate cancels $1,500 of orders a year. On a platform charging the gross, that is $45 paid on money you never received, plus the produce. On LocallyGrown it is nothing. That is not a large sum, but it is the difference between a fee structure that shares your risk and one that does not, and it tends to correlate with how the rest of a platform treats you.
More than it sounds, and mostly in your favour.
Money arrives in your account. There is no platform balance, no payout schedule set by someone else, and no waiting for a Friday transfer. Stripe pays you on Stripe's schedule, which you control.
The rate is Stripe's published rate. No markup, no platform margin buried in the processing line. What Stripe charges everyone is what you pay, and if Stripe changes it, you find out from Stripe.
You keep the relationship. Your transaction history, your dispute handling, your reporting. If you leave LocallyGrown, your payment processing does not move with it.
The cost is a bit more setup. You create a Stripe account, verify your business, and connect it, which is a twenty-minute job rather than a click. You also handle Stripe's disputes yourself rather than having a platform intermediate.
For most small operations that trade is clearly worth taking. The FDIC's consumer resource center is a reasonable plain-language reference on how funds and deposits actually work, which is more relevant than it sounds when you are deciding who should be holding your customers' money between the order and the payout.
LocallyGrown.net is a multi-grower market system: several growers list into one order cycle, customers order from the combined catalog, and the market coordinates pickup or delivery. It has been running a long time and it is a small operation, with support coming directly from the person who builds it.
That is a specific product with a specific customer, and it is worth knowing whether you are that customer.
Where it fits:
Where it does not:
Our fuller look at LocallyGrown.net for small markets covers the product, and our comparison of LocallyGrown against Local Food Marketplace puts its pricing next to the hub-software alternative.
It cuts both ways and it is worth being honest about.
In its favour: support comes from the person who wrote the code, which usually means fast, specific answers rather than a ticket queue. Small software often has less churn in the product, fewer forced migrations, and no pressure to add features nobody asked for.
Against it: there is key-person risk. One person cannot answer at 2am, cannot cover a holiday, and cannot guarantee the product outlives their interest in it. For a market whose whole ordering system runs on it, that is a real consideration rather than a theoretical one.
The mitigation is the same as with any platform, and it is worth doing regardless of who runs it: know what exports, and export it periodically. Your grower list, your customer list, and your order history should exist somewhere you control. If they do, the risk is an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.
USDA's Economic Research Service work on food markets and prices is useful background on how small direct-marketing operations are faring generally, which is worth a look when you are deciding how much infrastructure your market actually warrants.
If you are a single vendor rather than a multi-grower market, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: it is single-vendor. It does not coordinate multiple growers into one order cycle, does not split payouts, and does not ship nationally. If you are running a market for several producers, LocallyGrown is built for that and a single-vendor storefront is not. If you are one operation, you can run a week of orders through it and compare $120 a year against 3% of whatever you sell.
Question three is the one people skip. Percentage pricing feels free when you are small and becomes the largest software line you have when you are not. Put a note in your calendar for the point where 3% of your monthly sales exceeds $12, because that is the month a $144-a-year flat plan started being cheaper.
That is a gate you can pre-register rather than a decision you have to remember to revisit. Write down the number now, check it once a season, and act when it trips. When it does, pricing one month of your real orders against a flat-fee storefront takes ten minutes and tells you exactly what the switch is worth, rather than leaving it as a vague sense that fees have crept up.
Nothing to start. It charges 3% of completed sales after your first $15,000 in sales. You connect your own Stripe account and pay Stripe's published 2.9% plus $0.30 separately.
Yes, of LocallyGrown's own 3% fee. Stripe's processing applies from your first order, so on $15,000 across 600 orders you will still pay Stripe roughly $615.
Sales you actually kept. Refunded and cancelled orders are not charged the 3%. Whether a partial refund reduces the fee proportionally is not specified, so ask directly.
Around $20,000 a year in sales against a $144-a-year flat subscription, since 3% of the $4,800 above the free threshold equals $144. Above that, flat pricing wins by widening margins.
Because LocallyGrown does not process payments. Money goes directly into your account at Stripe's published rate with no platform markup, and you keep the relationship if you ever leave.
It provides a market listing, but treat it as an ordering system rather than a demand channel. Assume you are bringing your own customers, as with almost everything in this category.
It is a real consideration rather than a dealbreaker. The mitigation is the same as anywhere: know what exports, and export your grower list, customer list, and order history periodically to somewhere you control.
LocallyGrown.net's pricing is one of the few genuinely small-operation-friendly structures in this category. Nothing to start, nothing until $15,000, 3% only on money you actually kept, and your own Stripe account so nobody sits between you and your customers' payments.
The free threshold is worth $450 and lasts longer the smaller you are, which is the right way round. A market selling $1,000 a month gets fifteen months before paying anything.
What to watch is the crossover. Above roughly $20,000 a year, a flat $144 subscription costs less than the 3%, and the gap widens from there: at $50,000 you are paying $1,050 for software that others sell for $144. Percentage pricing is a great deal on the way up and a bad one once you have arrived.
