How to Price Cakes: A Calculator and Worked Example

Price a cake from its full cost: the materials, including the board, box and decorations, your hours from baking to the final piping, plus the time spent on the order itself, and a share of overhead, then add your margin. Your time is usually the biggest part, and it doesn't grow in step with the cake's size, so the cost per serving falls as cakes get bigger. In the example below, an 8-inch three-layer buttercream cake for 20 costs $114 to make, $26 of it materials and $80 of it four hours of work, and sells for $190, $9.50 a serving, at a 40% margin. A 6-inch cake costs $7.30 a serving to make and a 10-inch $4.93, so one price per serving for every size undercharges small cakes. Below is the cost worked through, three sizes compared, custom designs, and a free calculator.

The short version

• Cost the materials, including board, box, dowels and decorations.
• Count every hour: baking, filling, coating, decorating, and the order itself.
• Add a share of overhead: power, insurance, kitchen, website.
• Price for your margin, then see what it means per serving.
• Small cakes cost more per serving; price them that way.
• Custom designs are hours: price the extra hours, not a flat add-on.
• TaroStack keeps layers, buttercream and fillings as sub-recipes, costed at what you paid. More below.

One cake, costed

Windward Roots, the made-up taro business I use in these examples, takes an order for an 8-inch, three-layer vanilla cake with taro buttercream, for 20 people:

Add $8 of overhead, and the full cost is $114.00, or $5.70 a serving. At a 40% margin, $114 ÷ 0.6 = $190, $9.50 a serving. How to work out a labor rate for baking is in how to compute labor cost in baking, and pricing other baked goods in how to price baked goods.

Three sizes compared

Materials for the cake, buttercream and filling grow with the cake's area; the hours grow much more slowly.

Charge one price per serving, $9.50, for every size, and the 6-inch cake brings $114, a 23% margin, while the 10-inch brings $285, 48%. The small cakes subsidize the big ones. Price each size from its own cost, or use a higher rate per serving for small cakes. How to scale a recipe between sizes is in scaling recipes for production.

Custom designs

A design is hours. A sculpted or fondant-covered 8-inch cake might take three more hours and $10 more in fondant and gum paste: $184 of full cost, and about $305 at the same margin. Price the hours the design takes, and ask for the reference pictures before you quote, so you can estimate them. Delivery, rush orders and setup at a venue are hours and miles too; charge for them separately, and take a deposit to hold the date.

Get the calculator

Download the cake price calculator. Type the materials, the hours for each step, your rate, overhead, servings and margin; it works out the full cost, the price and the price per serving, and the Sizes sheet scales the materials to other sizes so you can see the cost per serving change. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.

Where this stops working

The calculator is right for the cake you priced. Then butter goes up, the taro buttercream recipe changes, and you have eight orders for Saturday in three sizes and four flavors. The calculator can't tell you what this week's orders need from the walk-in, when to bake which layers, or whether the cakes you quoted in spring still make the margin you priced them at.

How TaroStack does it

TaroStack keeps every cake's parts as recipes, costs them at what you paid, and plans the week from the orders.

Layers, buttercream and fillings as sub-recipes. A cake's recipe contains the layers, the buttercream and the filling as sub-recipes, so the taro buttercream is written once and used in every cake that has it. Units convert: buy butter by the case and flour by the bag, use them by the gram. Ingredients are costed at what you paid, so when butter goes up, every cake that uses it costs more, and a price-creep report per supplier shows who's moving it.

The week, from the orders. Each custom cake is a sales order for its date. Planning works out what to bake and when from those orders, and what to buy before you run out, and "what could I make right now" shows what the walk-in covers. Each bake is costed from the lots it used, so the cost of Saturday's cakes is what they really took.

And the margin is visible. Margins are reported by product and by customer on what each one actually cost, so you can see whether the 6-inch cakes earn what you priced them for.

Stock, counts, sales orders, margins, recipes with sub-recipes and costed bakes are on every plan, from $49 a month; planning is on Standard at $99. The first 30 days are free, with no credit card. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.

Questions people also ask

How much should I charge for a cake?

Price from the full cost: materials, your hours and overhead, then add your margin. In the example, an 8-inch three-layer cake for 20 costs $114 and sells for $190, $9.50 a serving, at a 40% margin.

How do I price a cake per serving?

Divide the price by the servings, but work out the price from each size's own cost. Small cakes cost more per serving to make, so one rate for every size undercharges them.

How much should I charge for my time making cakes?

Choose an hourly rate you'd accept for the work, and count every hour, including the order itself. In the example, $20 an hour over four hours is $80 of an 8-inch cake's $114 cost.

How do I price custom cake designs?

Estimate the extra hours the design takes and price them at your rate, plus the extra materials. In the example, three more hours and $10 of fondant raise the price from $190 to about $305.