The Homegrown Vendor Blog

Most home bakers underprice by 25-40% because labor gets counted as zero. Here is the formula, the batch-size lever, and how to spot the products that lose you money.

Selling home-baked goods is legal in all 50 states under cottage food law. What varies is what you can bake, where you can sell it, and how much you can earn first.

In 38 states a cottage food license costs nothing. Here is the 2026 permit fee for all 50 states, what you get for it, and the startup costs that hide behind a free permit.

Cottage food law lets you bake and sell from your own kitchen in every state. Here's the full sequence: your state's rules, what to bake, real startup costs, pricing that works, labels, and your first ten customers.

Almost every platform will say you own your customer list, and it settles nothing. What matters is whether you can see it, take it, lawfully use it, and whether they are using it too.

General e-commerce is built to put a package in the mail. Cottage food is built around a person collecting something on a specific day, under state rules that often prohibit shipping entirely.

This is not hypothetical. The failure mode is rarely an orderly wind-down with an export window; it is a domain that stops working, often with no announcement at all.

The clauses that cost vendors money are dull: renewal terms, unused annual terms, price-change notice, and content licences. None appear on a pricing page.

Ask questions with numeric answers. 'Do you handle sales tax?' gets a yes. 'Do you calculate, file, and remit, and in which states?' gets something you can act on.