Most bakers price by what feels right, or by quietly checking what the shop down the road charges. That is how a full diary can still leave you out of pocket at the end of the month.
The alternative is not complicated. It is just arithmetic you do once, then reuse.
Start from the real cost, not a guess
Add up what the cake actually costs you to make:
- Ingredients — to the gram, including the bits everyone forgets: ganache, dowels, boards, boxes, ribbon, the box of eggs you only used four of.
- Labour — your time is not free. Pick an hourly rate and count every hour, including shopping, cleaning and delivery.
- Overheads — gas, electricity, packaging, mileage, and a slice of anything you pay monthly.
That total is your floor. You never sell below it, no matter how much you want the job or how nice the customer is.
Two of those three get skipped by almost every new baker. Ingredients feel like the real cost because you paid cash for them. Labour and overheads feel free because you already own the oven and you were going to be in the kitchen anyway. They are not free — they are just paid for in a different currency.
Add the margin that keeps the lights on
Once you know the cost, add a margin. Most cake businesses aim for a 60–70% gross margin.
On a $40 cost, a 65% margin means a $114 price.
If that number makes you wince, sit with it. That price is not greedy. It is what covers the cake, your time, the equipment you will need to replace, the orders that cancel, and the weeks in January when nobody orders anything.
A price isn't rude. Underpricing is what closes bakeries.
Sanity-check per serving
Once you have a price, divide it by the number of servings and look at the number.
A $114 cake serving 20 is $5.70 a serving. Is that in line with what you charge for a bigger cake? If your small cakes come out at $6 a serving and your large ones at $3.50, your labour estimate on the small ones is probably wrong — small cakes are not proportionally quicker.
Per-serving is a check, not a pricing method. Price from cost; use the per-serving figure to catch mistakes.
If you are unsure how many servings a cake gives, that has its own answer: how many servings is a two-tier cake?
Charge for the things that are actually work
Some of these cost you hours and are routinely given away:
- Sugar flowers — hours of work, often quoted as if free
- Rush orders — a cake needed in four days displaces planning and shopping. A surcharge is fair.
- Delivery and setup — your time, your fuel, your risk in a car on a hot day
- Tastings — a full cake's worth of ingredients and an afternoon
- Custom colours or dietary versions — a separate bake, separate equipment cleaning, sometimes separate shopping
You do not have to charge for all of them. But you should decide, rather than discover afterwards that you did them for nothing.
When someone says it's too expensive
They usually are not haggling. They are telling you their budget.
The useful response is not to drop your price — it is to change the cake. Fewer tiers. Buttercream instead of fondant. A smaller cake plus a cutting cake in the kitchen. Simpler decoration with the same flavours.
That way the customer gets something they can afford and you keep your margin. Discounting keeps the same work and removes your profit, which helps nobody.
Some enquiries are not your customer, and that is fine. A baker with a full diary of underpriced cakes has less capacity for the ones that pay.
Do this once, not every time
The reason bakers price by feel is that doing it properly for every quote is tedious. That is a tooling problem, not a discipline problem.
Bake Boost prices every cake from your real recipes, ingredient costs and labour rate, so the maths happens once when you set up a recipe and then repeats itself on every quote. You see the cost, the margin and the price before you say yes — and on the Pro plan the AI Pricing Advisor sanity-checks the number against your own history.
Full walkthrough in the docs: how much should I charge for a cake?