The short version: These two are closer than almost any other pair in this category. Both are order management tools for cottage bakers who quote custom work. My Custom Bakes is $10 a month flat with no transaction fees, unlimited orders, and a free trial. Bakesy is $9.99 a month for Standard or $17.99 for Premium, with a 30-day free trial and no per-order platform fee, but card payments through Bakesy Secure Payments run 3.9% plus $0.30, a full point above the standard online rate. The subscriptions are within a penny of each other. The processing rate is where the money actually goes, and only one of these two publishes it.
Every figure below was read off each company's own site in July 2026. Verify before you buy.
Both are built for the same job: you get an inquiry for a birthday cake, you quote it, you take a deposit, and you deliver on a date. Neither is a browsable shop where a stranger buys a loaf of bread. Where they differ is in how the workflow is shaped and how much of it is gated.
My Custom Bakes is one product at one price. There is no tier structure. The pitch on its own site is deliberately narrow: an order management app that does not try to do everything, built for cottage food operators. Everything it has, you get for $10 a month.
Bakesy is two tiers, and the split matters. Standard at $9.99 covers the basics: a website, order forms, invoices, galleries, availability, receipts, reviews, and a custom domain. Premium at $17.99 is where tips, instant checkout, the revenue dashboard, inventory management, automated customer reminders, calendar sync, extra themes, and hiding the Bakesy logo on your shop and invoices live.
The practical consequences:
If most of your orders are repeat items rather than one-off quotes, it is worth reading how Bakesy compares against a set-menu storefront before choosing between two quote-first tools.
Same four disclosures on every platform. Where a rate is not published, this table says so.
| My Custom Bakes | Bakesy | Homegrown | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $10/mo flat, one tier | $9.99/mo Standard, $17.99/mo Premium | $10/mo billed annually, or $12.50/mo billed monthly |
| Free trial | Free trial offered, length not stated on the site | 30-day free trial | 7-day free trial |
| Platform fee | $0, described as no transaction fees, unlimited orders | $0 | $0, 0% commission |
| Card processing | Not published. The 0% claim covers the platform fee, not the card processor's rate | 3.9% + $0.30 through Bakesy Secure Payments | 2.9% + $0.30 |
The 0% transaction fee claim needs reading carefully. My Custom Bakes states no transaction fees and no hidden costs, and there is no reason to doubt it about its own platform fee. But no payment processor moves money for free. Whatever card rate you pay on My Custom Bakes, it goes to the processor rather than to My Custom Bakes, and the site does not say what it is. That is a question for a support chat before you sign up, not an assumption to carry into a budget.
Bakesy's 3.9% is the number to focus on. Most online checkouts run at 2.9% plus $0.30. Bakesy's payments page states 3.9% plus $0.30 for Bakesy Secure Payments and notes the method is optional. You can accept Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, or Cash App with no Bakesy fee, but then you are chasing payments manually, which is the work you bought software to stop doing.
For why the 2.9% figure keeps recurring, the Federal Reserve publishes average interchange fees by payment card network under Regulation II. Interchange is the wholesale cost every processor pays before adding margin, and it sets the practical floor for online card acceptance. A platform pricing a full point above that floor is keeping the difference.
Take a baker doing $1,500 a month across 15 custom orders, so a $100 average order and $18,000 a year. Custom cake work runs at higher order values and lower counts than retail baking, so those are realistic numbers.
Bakesy Standard, using Bakesy Secure Payments
Bakesy Premium, using Bakesy Secure Payments
My Custom Bakes, assuming a standard 2.9% plus $0.30 processor
Homegrown, billed annually
The subscriptions differ by $1.44 a year between My Custom Bakes and Bakesy Standard. The processing differs by roughly $180 a year on the same sales. That is the entire comparison in one line: on a custom-order business, the platform fee is noise and the processing rate is the decision.
To be fair to Bakesy, the $756 figure only applies if you use Bakesy Secure Payments. If you take payment by Venmo or Zelle, Bakesy's own cut is zero, and your cost is $119.88 for the year. You are then doing the reconciliation by hand, and you lose the automated receipts and instant checkout you paid for.
It is worth checking that trade-off against what your time is worth rather than treating it as free money. Chasing a Zelle payment for a $250 cake means a reminder text, a check of your bank app, and a manual note in whatever you use to track orders. Call it ten minutes an order. At 180 orders a year that is 30 hours, which is most of a working week spent moving money by hand to avoid roughly $600 in processing. For some bakers that is a good trade and for others it plainly is not, but it is a trade, and platforms that advertise a zero fee on alternative payment methods rarely frame it as one. Run the number on your own volume before you decide, and price a storefront with a published card rate into the comparison so you know what the automated version actually costs.
Work it in this order.
Its stated user base is around 1,700 cottage food operators, and it has been running since 2021. The honest caution is the unpublished processing rate: a $10 flat price is only the whole story if the card rate behind it is competitive, and you should establish that before you migrate anything. Our fuller look at My Custom Bakes for home bakery orders covers who it fits and who outgrows it.
Bakesy's weakness is the 3.9% rate and the Premium gate working together. The cheap tier is genuinely cheap, but a baker doing real volume on Bakesy Secure Payments pays more per year than on either alternative here, and the features that make the tool feel complete are on the more expensive plan. Our breakdown of Bakesy for cottage food sellers works through where that lands.
Both are quote-and-invoice tools. That shape creates the same four gaps.
There is one more consideration specific to custom cake work that no platform solves: character cakes and licensed designs. Copying a protected logo or character onto a cake you sell is a real legal exposure, and the USPTO's trademark basics is the plain-language starting point. Whichever tool you use, your order form is the right place to set expectations about what you will and will not reproduce.
Being straight about this: on custom orders specifically, both of these tools do things Homegrown does not.
Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually, or $12.50 billed monthly, with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 card processing, published on the signup page. Homegrown does not have custom-order request forms, deposit schedules, or a quoting workflow. Custom orders are on the roadmap and not live today. If your entire business is quoting one-off cakes, My Custom Bakes and Bakesy are built for that and Homegrown is not.
What Homegrown does instead is the part neither of them covers: a standalone storefront on your own link that a stranger can order from without messaging you first, pickup at every place you actually sell, local delivery with a radius you set and a flat fee you keep plus a route to run, listing on the Homegrown marketplace, and sales tax calculated and remitted in all 50 states without you filing anything. The 7-day trial charges nothing until day eight.
The practical read: if you sell decorated cakes to order, use a quoting tool. If you also sell cookies, bread, or bars that people could just buy, a quoting tool makes them message you for something that should have taken one tap. Plenty of bakers do both, which is why it is worth seeing what a browsable storefront changes before deciding your whole business belongs in an inbox. Our comparison of order management tools for home bakers sets out where each category starts and stops.
$10 a month flat, with one tier, unlimited orders, no transaction fees on its own platform, and cancellation at any time. A free trial is offered, though the length is not stated on the site. The card processing rate is not published, so ask before you sign up.
$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.
On subscription, they are effectively identical at the entry tier, $10 against $9.99. On total cost, My Custom Bakes is very likely cheaper because Bakesy's 3.9% processing costs roughly $180 more per year on $18,000 in sales. That conclusion depends on My Custom Bakes using a standard 2.9% processor, which is worth confirming directly.
It charges no platform fee of its own, which is what the claim means. Card processing is a separate cost paid to the processor, and every platform that accepts cards has one. Ask what rate applies before you treat $10 a month as your whole software cost.
My Custom Bakes, based on published features. It lets each order carry its own payment schedule, including collecting the full amount upfront or splitting 50/50 with a balance due date you choose. For custom cake work booked months ahead, that flexibility does real work.
Not in the way a shop does. Both are built around an inquiry that becomes a quote. If you want a stranger to browse products and check out without a conversation, you are looking at a different category of tool.
Ask both before you commit, and test the export during your trial rather than at the moment you want to leave. For a custom-order business, your history of past quotes, prices, and customer notes is genuinely valuable, and losing it is a real cost.
These two are close enough on subscription that the decision comes down to two questions. First, what card rate does My Custom Bakes actually charge, because if it is standard, it wins on cost by roughly $180 a year at moderate volume. Second, do you need anything on Bakesy's Premium list, because that changes the comparison from $10 against $9.99 to $10 against $17.99.
Pick My Custom Bakes if you want one price, deposit schedules, and a Terms and Conditions template. Pick Bakesy if you want the 30-day trial, a gallery-forward page, and the option to take payment outside the platform entirely. And if a meaningful share of your sales are products people could simply buy without quoting, look at whether a storefront belongs alongside whichever quoting tool you choose.
