09/01/2026
Beginner Baker Pricing Mistakes I Had to Unlearn
I still see posts all the time that say:
“What would you charge for this?”
And I completely understand why—because when I first started my home bakery, I thought pricing was pretty straightforward too.
Ingredient cost + what I wanted to make per hour + packaging = my price.
Turns out, I had a LOT to learn.
Here are some of the assumptions I made when I was new:
❌ “I need to know what other bakers are charging.”
Not really. The baker down the street might buy ingredients somewhere completely different than you. Their packaging may cost less. They may work twice as fast—or half as fast. They may have different overhead. They may value their labor at $12/hour while you've decided yours is worth $20.
Their price doesn't tell you what your product needs to cost.
❌ “If someone orders a lot, I should give them a discount.”
I learned this one the expensive way.
I once received an order for 35 DOZEN cake pucks.
My brain immediately went, That's a huge order. Surely I need to give them some kind of bulk discount.
Want to know what the customer said about a discount?
Nothing.
They never asked for one. I decided for them that they shouldn't have to pay my regular price.
Meanwhile, a 35-dozen order didn't magically make the work disappear (in fact there was more!). I still had to make, dip, decorate and package 420 cake pucks.
A large order isn't automatically wholesale.
❌ “My ingredients only cost $, so charging $ is plenty.”
Ingredients are only one piece of the cost of doing business.
There's packaging. Labels. Parchment. Gloves. Electricity. Equipment. Payment processing fees. Failed batches. Cleaning time. Shopping. Prep. Communication. And about 47 other tiny expenses that don't seem like much until they're eating your profit.
❌ “I should charge what people are willing to pay.”
Your price has to work mathematically before you worry about whether everyone will pay it.
Because everyone won't.
That's okay.
If your business requires you to sell a $6 cookie for $4 to get customers, selling more cookies isn't necessarily going to fix the problem.
❌ “Someone can look at a picture and tell me what I should charge.”
This might be the biggest one.
If I show you a picture of a gorgeous 4-ounce apple spice cookie with vanilla bean glaze and ask:
“What would you charge?”
You can tell me what you'd charge.
But you can't tell me what I need to charge.
You don't know my recipe cost. My yield. My packaging. My labor time. My overhead. My market. My business model. Or the profit margin I'm trying to achieve.
And that's the difference between picking a price and pricing a product.
I wish someone had explained that distinction to me when I started.
So if you're a newer baker and you've been asking, “What should I charge for this?”—start changing the question.
Instead ask:
“What does MY business need me to charge for this?”
That's the number that actually matters.
I put together a free pricing guide based on everything I learned to create pricing that made profit sense and it's in my shop under freebies (along with some other lessons I've learned along that). Here's the link: https://stan.store/BoujieBites
