Hey everyone. I've been baking sourdough for years and recently started thinking seriously about selling at my local farmers market.
I went through the whole "how much do I charge?" spiral. I tried the 3x-ingredients rule and realized it doesn't account for the 80+ minutes of active labor that goes into a two-day sourdough process. I built myself a spreadsheet, then realized I wasn't accounting for starter maintenance costs (my starter eats flour every day whether I bake or not). Then I forgot to include packaging and energy costs. The spreadsheet got messy.
I'm a software engineer by day, so I figured I'd just build the tool I wished existed. It's a free web-based calculator: no signup, no download, no email required. You punch in your recipe, your ingredient costs, your time, and it shows you a full cost breakdown per loaf with a real-time hourly wage calculation. That last part was the gut check I needed. It turns out at $7/loaf I was going to pay myself about $4/hour.
A few things it does that generic baking calculators don't:
- Accounts for starter maintenance as a real ongoing cost
- Breaks labor into sourdough-specific tasks (mixing, folds, shaping, oven management, cleanup)
- Shows your effective hourly wage as you adjust your selling price
- Shows you concrete ways to improve your margins (bigger batches, bulk flour, faster workflow) with real dollar amounts
It's completely free, no strings attached. I built it because I needed it and figured other people here might too.
Would love feedback from anyone who's been through the pricing struggle. What am I missing? What would make this more useful?
It sounds very helpful. But even without including estimates for all those other costs it's hard to make a convincing case for getting much hourly return. Every once in a while I run through a rough estimation and it's always discouraging.
TomP
...if you are in the US/Canada, you won't be reporting to the IRS or CRA about your sideline. If that is correct, carry on.
From a tax point of view, there's an ineligible expense.
In the end I suppose you charge what the local market will bear, but it's good to know what your outlays are I suppose.
As far as the tool, the first thing I can think of is a way to export or save a particular run, as I would suppose you'd need to do several of them based on varying formulas.
The other thing I wonder about is, all the labor costs seem to be 'by batch', but there are a lot of labor (and other) costs that may be per week or some other time frame or unit. I'm thinking, just to name a few: time to procure ingredients (shopping) travel (to store, to market), time at the market (lots of time there - several hours per week).
Other costs may be tough to calculate on a per loaf cost but that is the only spot I see to add them in 'overhead' - how about 'rent/storage' for all the space and equipment this stuff is going to take up or require, depreciation of equipment over a given period of time (a year?) such as new/broken cambros, proofing baskets, mixers, oven, etc.
It's already enough to convince me not to waste time selling bread, as the volume required for a profit would convert my love of bread making into a job I would hate.
Not to mention dealing with customers and anything required to procure a venue to sell, comply with state and local regulations, etc. Basically all the work of running a business is missing.
There is a way to add those items in, but if the purpose of the calculator is to encourage bakers to pay themselves a fair wage, I think that side of the job should at least be suggested as people are likely to overlook such aspects.
As soon as the filter was removed they are back. Check the time they have been members. Almost always SPAM!
I don't agree that if someone scratches their own itch by vibe coding a little application and then joins a forum board to share it with other people who practice the same hobby it's the same thing as someone getting paid to create fake posts to smuggle in casino links for gaming SEO. The latter is unambiguously spam. The former? Not really, IMO.
It's pretty neat. Thanks for sharing.
Trolls, bots … put the filter back please. 🙏