Your $20 of ingredients costs $70 to make
Ingredients are the cheap part. The hours decorating, the oven, packaging and fixed costs are the rest — and labour alone is over half. Most cake makers charge for ingredients and give the work away.
Free plan. No credit card required.
Real figures from a 2kg decorated birthday cake in CrafterBy: $20 of ingredients and 4.5 hours of labour. Yours will vary by recipe, decoration and cost structure.
Isto não é maquete. É o produto rodando.
A real product in a real CrafterBy workspace: a decorated birthday cake. Ingredients cost $20. CrafterBy shows what the cake really consumed — including your hours.
- Ingredients
- R$ 96,44
- Labour (4.5 h)
- R$ 180,00
- Oven + mixer
- R$ 3,92
- Packaging + overhead
- R$ 50,91
- Real cost
- R$ 331,27
- Selling price
- R$ 579,72
- Margin
- 42,9%
Cost breakdown of a decorated cake in CrafterBy — ingredients, labour, oven and overhead, separately.
You cost the ingredients. What about your hours?
Most cake makers price off the recipe, because it is the easy number. It is also the smallest part of what the cake truly costs.
What you calculate today
Correto, e muito longe de ser suficiente.
- Ingredients — $20
- 4.5 h of prep and decoration
O que fica de fora
Cada um destes é um custo real que você já está pagando.
- Oven and mixer depreciation
- Power for the oven, fridge and equipment
- The cake that sank and had to be remade
- The hours decorating, assembling and finishing
- Packaging, box and cake board
- Rent, gas, water and accounting allocated per hour
Charge for ingredients alone and you are working for free — or at a loss.
Six costs in every cake. Most makers charge one.
CrafterBy models each layer separately, so the price reflects what the cake genuinely consumes — including your time.
Ingredients and waste
Flour, sugar, chocolate, cream and fondant priced in the unit you buy, with a waste factor for trimmings and loss.
Waste factor per ingredient
Oven and depreciation
Give the oven and mixer a price and a working life, and CrafterBy turns run time into a real hourly cost, including preheating.
Straight-line depreciation
Energy
Set equipment wattage and your kWh rate. An industrial oven running for hours costs far more than you think.
Watts x hours x kWh rate
Cakes that fail
The cake that sank, the frosting that split — log the loss at the stage it happened and it lands on the product that caused it.
Scrap tracked per stage
Labour
Prepping, filling, assembling and decorating are real hours — and on a decorated cake, most of the cost. Record them at your rate instead of giving them away.
Multiple labour rates per product
Packaging and fixed costs
Box, cake board and the business's fixed costs (rent, gas, accounting) are allocated per production hour and baked into every cake.
Overhead per hour
The sunken cake is the cost nobody charges for
Four hours of work and the cake sinks in the oven the day before delivery. The ingredients are gone, the time is gone, the energy is gone — and you still have to remake it. In most bakeries that loss quietly disappears into a margin nobody recalculates.
CrafterBy gives failure a home. Add a waste factor so every order carries its share of expected loss, or log a scrapped batch at a specific stage so the loss is charged to the product that caused it.
From recipe to quote in under a minute
Set the bakery up once. Every order after that is priced in the time it takes to read the customer's message.
- 1
Add ingredients and equipment
Enter ingredient prices in the pack you buy, and the oven with its wattage and lifespan. Set your labour rate.
- 2
Build the recipe
Pick ingredients and quantities, oven time and — most importantly — the hours of prep and decoration. The full cost assembles as you go.
- 3
Set your margin and send it
Choose a markup or target margin for your selling price. Save it as a template and reuse it for the next order.
Built for makers with more than one kind of cake
A cake-in-a-jar and a three-tier wedding cake cost nothing alike, and an 'average' price hides which is carrying which. CrafterBy costs each recipe on its own terms.
Set up your bakery- A real cost per recipe, from truffles to wedding cakes
- Labour separated from ingredients, so you see what you charge for your time
- Fixed business costs allocated per production hour
- Reusable templates to quote orders in seconds
Questions cake makers ask
- Does it work for cakes, sweets and desserts?
- Yes. Each recipe is a product with its ingredients, oven time and labour. From a batch of truffles to a wedding cake, all are calculated the same way.
- How do I put in the value of my labour?
- You set your hourly rate and record the time of each stage — prep, assembly, decoration. On a decorated cake this is most of the cost, and what most makers forget to charge.
- How do I account for cakes that go wrong?
- Two ways. A waste factor on ingredients spreads expected loss, and logging a scrapped batch on a production order charges a specific failure to the product that caused it.
- Can I reuse a recipe for another order?
- Yes. Save any cake as a template and duplicate it for size, flavour or customer variants. Update an ingredient price once and every recipe using it reflects the change.
Stop giving your work away for free
Set up your ingredients, equipment and fixed costs in an afternoon, and price every order for what it truly costs — including your hours.
Free plan available. No credit card required.