Price the cake like your time is worth something.
Tiers become servings at the slice size you choose. Then your real ingredient cost, your hours at your rate, and a margin — because 'it only cost me $40 in ingredients' is how a full day's work becomes a $40 cake. Everything stays in your browser.
The tiers
Shape and size per tier — round, square, or rect (give a rect both sides).
The money
The day
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
For anything you will eat or sell as food, double-check it against your own process and your local rules. This page does maths, not food safety.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper the ingredients price themselves from your real pantry costs, your rate saves once, every bake logs what it actually consumed, and the quote you text back stands on your own numbers. See for cottage food makers or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
The cake pricing math, with your hours in it
Cake pricing is the most-asked money question in home baking, and most answers dodge the hard part: your hours. The math below is the same math the calculator runs — servings from geometry, price from cost plus time plus margin — in the open.
How many people does a tiered cake actually serve?
Geometry over a slice. The industry standard 'wedding slice' is 1" wide by 2" deep — the convention behind every published serving chart — and a tier's servings are its area divided by that footprint. A 10/8/6 three-tier runs just under 80 wedding servings; cut 'party' slices at 1.5" by 2" and the same cake serves a third fewer. That is why the slice size is a setting here and not a constant: the count is honest only when the slice is the one you will actually cut.
What should I charge for a custom cake?
Start from what it costs — all of it. Ingredients and the box are the cash cost; then your hours at a real hourly rate, because decorating is skilled labor whether or not anyone calls it that; then a margin on top for the business itself. A $40-ingredient cake that takes six hours at $22 an hour is a $170 cake before margin, and pricing it at $60 is paying to work. The panic-text moment — 'how much for a two-tier for 30?' — deserves arithmetic, not a guess.
Why is my time not part of the 'cost'?
Because the two numbers do different jobs, and blending them breaks both. Cost — ingredients, box, board — is what the cake takes out of your pocket, and it is what belongs in your books as cost of goods. Your time belongs in the PRICE: it is why the price is what it is, but it is not a receipt you can deduct. Keeping them separate is what lets you see, honestly, that a cake made money — or that it did not.
What about cottage food rules?
Your state's cottage food law governs what you can sell and how it must be labeled — and those rules are your homework, not this calculator's. This page does arithmetic: servings, cost, price. It asserts nothing about licensing, labeling, or what your kitchen may produce, because a stale legal claim is worse than none.