MadeKeeper is inventory and pricing software for cottage food makers.
Fruit and sugar go in at what you paid, jars and lids too, and the yield comes back out in jars. The cost of one jar is that batch divided by the count, kept with the lot it came from.
Free tools, no signup: the fair profit calculator.
free to start, and no card to start. No order-line meters, ever.
$19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. No card to start — MadeKeeper asks for one when you subscribe, not before. 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.
Jams, baked goods & candy, specifically
Same books underneath — the numbers below are the ones that change.
Sourdough bread
A sourdough micro-bakery runs on bake days: levain built the night before, eight loaves through the oven by morning, a porch-pickup list and a market table waiting. Flour is cheap, the oven runs hours, and the bread sells the day it's baked or not at all. MadeKeeper prices the bake day to the loaf and tells you what Saturday actually paid.
Say you bake 8 country loaves:
- 9 lb bread flour @ 62¢/lb (dough + starter feeds)$5.58
- Salt and rice flour for the bannetons$0.60
- 8 bread bags @ 22¢$1.76
- Oven, 3 hours$1.35
- 8 labels @ 8¢$0.64
At $9 a loaf you keep $7.76 each — the bake day grosses $72.00 on under ten dollars of ingredients, and the real cost was the five hours. MadeKeeper divides those in too, which is where your price per loaf finds its spine.
Cupcakes & muffins
A home bakery sells by the dozen and leaks by the little stuff: liners, boxes, and the butter that tripled in price since you last did the math. Cupcake orders book for weekends; muffins move at the market by the half-dozen. MadeKeeper prices the batch with the packaging counted, so the dozen leaves the counter at a number that works.
Say you bake two dozen cupcakes for a pickup:
- Cake (flour, sugar, butter, eggs, milk)$7.20
- Buttercream (butter, powdered sugar, vanilla)$5.45
- 24 liners @ 3¢$0.72
- 2 bakery boxes @ $1.40$2.80
At $36 a dozen the order pays $72.00 and keeps $55.83 — before the two hours of baking and frosting, which MadeKeeper also counts, because 'it's just cupcakes' is how home bakers end up working for flour.
Hot sauce
Hot sauce is a bottling operation the day it stops being a hobby: peppers by the pound, vinegar by the gallon, and a five-gallon kettle that fills sixty woozy bottles needing caps, shrink bands, and labels. The bottle costs more than what's in it. MadeKeeper runs the batch math and keeps the records a sauce business lives on.
Say you cook a 5-gallon batch — 60 5-oz woozies:
- 12 lb peppers @ $2.20/lb$26.40
- 2.5 gal vinegar @ $3.40$8.50
- Garlic, salt, and spices$4.10
- 60 woozy bottles and caps @ 52¢$31.20
- Shrink bands and labels, 60 @ 14¢$8.40
At $10 a bottle you keep $8.69 — and at a $6 wholesale price to the shop, $4.69. Both work; they're just different businesses, and MadeKeeper keeps them from blurring into one flattering average.
Granola
Granola looks like an oat product and costs like a nut product: the almonds, pecans, and seeds run two-thirds of every batch while the oats round to pocket change. Add stand-up pouches, labels, and a market table price the customer compares to the grocery aisle, and the margin lives or dies on the mix. MadeKeeper prices the batch the way it's actually built.
Say you bake a batch that fills 14 12-oz bags:
- 7 lb oats @ $1.05/lb$7.35
- 3 lb almonds and pecans @ $5.40/lb$16.20
- 1.5 lb honey @ $3.80/lb$5.70
- Oil, vanilla, and salt$2.10
- Stand-up pouches and labels, 14 @ 38¢$5.32
At $9 a bag you keep $6.38 — and the ledger shows the nuts took $16.20 of the batch while the oats took $7.35. That's the number to stare at before reformulating, and before agreeing to the café's wholesale ask.
Freeze-dried candy
Freeze-dried candy is a machine business wearing a candy costume: the taffy and gummies are cheap, but every bag rides a 24-hour cycle on a machine that cost as much as a used car. Bags that ignore the freeze dryer's share are priced wrong from the start. MadeKeeper costs the run — candy, power, packaging, and the machine's cut.
Say a 24-hour cycle fills 20 bags:
- 6 lb of candy @ $3.30/lb$19.80
- Electricity, one full cycle$2.90
- 20 stand-up pouches @ 32¢$6.40
- 20 labels @ 10¢$2.00
At $8 a bag you keep $6.44 — before the machine's share. Spread a $2,500 freeze dryer across 300 runs and each cycle carries about $8.33 more, or 42 cents a bag. Now the price is built on the whole truth.
Jerky & dried meats
Jerky is a shrink business: six pounds of raw round dries down to about two pounds of finished jerky, so the lean meat you bought is most of what every bag costs. Add cure, seasoning, smoke, resealable pouches, and a six-month best-by, and the margin lives on yield. MadeKeeper costs the batch by what actually came off the racks, not by what went on them.
Say a batch dries 6 lb of raw round into 16 2-oz bags:
- 6 lb lean top round @ $6.50/lb$39.00
- Cure, salt, and marinade$3.20
- 16 resealable pouches @ 22¢$3.52
- 16 labels @ 9¢$1.44
At $9 a bag you keep $6.05 before the table fee — and the ledger shows the beef alone took $39.00 of the $47.16, better than four dollars of every bag. That 3-to-1 shrink is why jerky priced like a snack quietly loses money; MadeKeeper prices it like the meat business it is.
Coffee roasting
Micro-roasting has one piece of math the spreadsheet always fumbles: green beans lose about 15% of their weight in the roaster, so a 12-oz bag starts life as nearly 14 ounces of green. Get that wrong across a season and the margin quietly evaporates with the chaff. MadeKeeper builds the shrink into every batch, valve bags and labels included.
Say you roast for 10 12-oz bags:
- 8.8 lb green beans @ $5.60/lb (15% roast loss)$49.28
- Roaster fuel and power$0.85
- 10 valve bags @ 44¢$4.40
- 10 labels @ 10¢$1.00
At $16 a bag you keep $10.45 — and when the green supplier raises the Ethiopian a dollar, the next session's cost says whether $16 holds or the origin rotates out. No more finding out at tax time.
Hot cocoa bombs
Cocoa bombs are precision chocolate work on a holiday clock: couverture tempered to a snap, molded shells, cocoa and marshmallows sealed inside, and nearly all of it selling between Thanksgiving and New Year's. The chocolate is real money and the season doesn't forgive guesswork. MadeKeeper costs the batch and keeps last December on file for this one.
Say you mold a batch of 24 bombs:
- 4 lb couverture chocolate @ $6.20/lb$24.80
- Cocoa mix and mini marshmallows$6.30
- Foil wraps and boxes, 24 @ 45¢$10.80
- Labels and ribbon$1.90
At $6 each you keep $4.17 a bomb — and the four-pack gift box at $22 clears $14.68. The season is short; the ledger makes sure every week of it gets priced like it counts.
A batch of jam is fruit, sugar, pectin, and a case of jars — twelve half-pints, each needing a label, a price, and a sell-by. Cottage food runs on batches and market days, with your state's rules riding along. MadeKeeper costs the batch to the jar, keeps the records, and tells you whether Saturday's table beat staying home.
How MadeKeeper maps to your kitchen
MadeKeeper buys ingredients by the pound and jars by the case
Fruit, sugar, pectin, flour, butter — logged at grocery-receipt reality. A batch recipe pulls them down and splits the cost across the jars or loaves it made.MadeKeeper dates every batch you put up
Every water-bath run gets a batch date and a sell-by. What's fresh, what's close, and what needs the discount basket is a glance, not a sniff test.MadeKeeper turns market day into a profit-and-loss
Table fee, miles at the IRS rate, the morning's hours — against what actually sold. The drive-home question, "did I even make money today?", gets a number.MadeKeeper reconciles the honor box against the wholesale case
Roadside honor-box sales and a case into the local shop track alongside market days — every channel in one ledger, each at its own prices.One batch of jam, to the penny
Say you put up 12 half-pints of strawberry jam:
- 6 lb strawberries @ $2.80/lb$16.80
- 4 lb sugar @ 89¢/lb$3.56
- Pectin$2.40
- 12 jars and lids @ $1.05$12.60
- 12 labels @ 8¢$0.96
At $9 a jar you keep $5.97 each before the table fee — so a market that sells eight jars grossed $72.00 and needs the rest of the table to carry the morning. MadeKeeper does that whole-table math for you.
Watch the allergen line get confirmed
Twenty-five seconds of the real app: the label sheet reads the materials you declared — heavy cream in the batch, so the label will carry Contains: Milk — and printing stays locked until you check that line yourself and confirm it. MadeKeeper builds the suggestion from your own records; only you can say what is actually in the jar.
MadeKeeper keeps the batch records your state's cottage food paperwork asks about — dates, ingredients, lots — and your labels' information lives in the app instead of a recipe-box card; your state's allowed list and caps stay yours to check.
Market Saturday, for cottage food makers
The bench is one half of it. MadeKeeper follows cottage food makers out to the booth as well: it opens on one bar of signal, rings a sale in taps and files it against that day's event, holds that sale on the phone if the signal quits and puts it through when the bars come back, reads the tag you printed, and prints a market-day sheet before you load the truck.
None of that is a card reader. Cottage food makers take payment however they already take it; MadeKeeper only keeps the count honest while you sell. Everything it does at the booth →
Straight about what's live
Materials and true cost per piece, batch "makes" with your labor amortized in, the suggested-price coach, product variants, sales that drain stock, the market-day quick-sale screen, lot tracking, the was-this-fair-worth-it event math, money-insight reports, multi-location consignment, the cure/best-by heads-up engine, mileage, expenses, and the Schedule C tax packet are all in the app today, with guided setup and a full Craftybase history migration to get you started. So are Etsy order sync, Square card sync, your own shop page, a Buy button on your own Square account, and custom-order requests off a piece you already sold. On the $24 MadeKeeper AI plan you also get receipts, shelves and recipe cards read from a photo — photo reads are on that plan; hand entry is how the $19 shop starts. Still building: your own books answered in plain words, buying a shipping label inside the app, and a best-customers report. MadeKeeper does not send marketing email to your buyers and is not going to: every maker here sends from one shared reputation, and a quote that has to arrive matters more than a mailing list. Nothing above is dressed up as done when it is not. See the full live-vs-building list →
Questions cottage food makers ask
Can MadeKeeper track sell-by dates?
Yes — batches carry made-on and sell-by dates, so your stock answer is always "what's fresh," not just "what's on the shelf." The discount basket gets its own pricing tier.
How does market-day math work?
Log the table fee, the round-trip miles, and your hours; count what sold. The event report answers profit, profit per hour, and go-back-or-skip — the drive-home questions, answered before the drive home.
Does it help with cottage food paperwork?
It keeps the records — batches, dates, ingredients, sales — organized and exportable. What your state allows, caps, and requires on labels stays between you and your program's rules.
How do I cost a loaf when the starter is free?
The starter's flour isn't — the daily feeds log with the bake day's flour, so the levain's appetite is in the loaf price. The wild yeast itself remains, as ever, unpaid labor.
What about special loaves and add-ins?
Cheese-jalapeño, cinnamon-raisin, chocolate — each variant carries its add-in costs on its own recipe line, so the $12 specialty loaf earns its two extra dollars on paper, not just on smell.
Can it handle a porch-pickup subscription?
Yes — standing weekly orders run as their own channel with recurring sales against each bake day. You'll see whether the pickup list or the market morning is really carrying the oven.
How should I price custom sets?
From your own history: the ledger holds each set's materials and hours, so 'detailed characters run $58 a dozen, simple shapes $40' comes from evidence. Quotes get faster and firmer at the same time.
What about practice cookies and mistakes?
The cracked ones and the color tests log as batch loss — real yield, honest math. A season of records will also show which designs break the most, which quietly reprices them.
Can I track a cookie class or decorating kits?
Yes — kits (cookies, icing bags, sprinkles) and class seats run as their own products. Many decorators find the kits out-earn custom sets per hour, and the ledger will say whether that's true at your table.
How do I keep up with ingredient prices?
Log purchases at the receipt and the batch cost moves with the store. When eggs spike, you'll see the dozen's cost climb that week — and raise the price from a fact instead of a feeling.
Cupcake orders versus market muffins — track separately?
Yes, as channels: booked orders with deposits on one side, market count-back on the other. Most bakers discover one of them is quietly subsidizing the other; the ledger says which.
What about custom toppers and themes?
Theme add-ons — toppers, colors, filled centers — log as extra recipe lines on that order, so the birthday premium covers its real extra cost and hours, not just its extra cuteness.
Why does everyone warn me about the paperwork?
Because shelf-stable sauce is an acidified food, and that's a real food-safety category with real records. The good news: batch logs with lots, dates, and recipes — the part MadeKeeper does — is most of what that world asks to see.
How does fermented sauce change the math?
The ferment is work in progress — peppers and salt committed weeks before bottling day. MadeKeeper carries the crock on the books until the kettle turns it into lots, so the long game costs honestly.
What about wholesale into shops?
Wholesale runs as its own channel at its own price. The bottle bill doesn't shrink at wholesale — which is exactly why the ledger's per-bottle floor is the number to negotiate from.
How do I compete with grocery-store granola prices?
You don't — you price as the small-batch product you are and let the ingredient list argue for you. What MadeKeeper adds is the floor: your real $2.62 per bag says exactly how low a market-day discount can go before you're paying people to take it.
What about flavor variations?
Each flavor is a recipe variant with its own mix cost — the chocolate-cherry runs a dollar more per bag than the classic, and now both prices know it.
Can I track a subscription or standing orders?
Yes — recurring orders run as their own channel against each batch. The subscription's steady dozen bags a month is the quiet backbone many granola businesses don't realize they have until they see it charted.
How do I account for the machine itself?
Give each cycle a machine-wear share — the purchase price divided across its expected runs — and let every bag carry its slice. It's the difference between a business that's saving for the second machine and one that's surprised it can't.
What about failed runs and re-runs?
The batch that came out chewy logs as the loss it was, or re-runs at the cost of another cycle. Either way the yield math stays honest — and a pattern of failures next to the notes usually points at the tray loading.
Candy prices swing — does the math keep up?
Each purchase logs at its price, so the run made from clearance-sale taffy shows its genuinely better margin, and the full-price run doesn't hide behind it.
How does MadeKeeper handle the shrink?
You log the raw weight in and the finished bags out, and the batch splits its whole cost across the yield — so the 3-to-1 loss is priced in, not guessed at. A dry batch that came out light shows the thinner margin honestly.
Can it track best-by dates?
Yes — each batch carries a made-on date and a best-by, defaulted around jerky's six-month mark. Bags past their best-by drop out of your sellable and market-ready counts, so nothing stale rides along to the table.
Is jerky even allowed under cottage food laws?
Often not — dried meat is one of the products most states keep out of home kitchens, and the rules vary widely. MadeKeeper keeps the records an inspected kitchen would keep regardless; what your state allows and licenses stays between you and your program.
Why does the 15% loss matter so much?
Because it compounds silently: price bags from green weight and every bag undercharges by two ounces of beans. Across a thousand bags a year, that's a sack of coffee you gave away. The recipe's loss factor closes the leak permanently.
How do I track multiple origins and blends?
Each green logs as its own material; a blend's recipe pulls from two or three sacks at ratio. Single origins and blends each know their true cost, which is what makes the $2 single-origin premium defensible.
Does the roaster itself go in the math?
As an expense, visible at tax time — with a per-session wear share if you want each bag to carry it. Most micro-roasters add it once volume gets real; the app makes it a one-line change.
How do I plan chocolate buying for a six-week season?
From last season's ledger: bombs sold by week, by flavor, at what margin. Buy November's couverture from that page and the year you over-ordered forty pounds becomes a story instead of a pattern.
What about seized chocolate and cracked shells?
Losses log on the batch, so your real yield — not your hopeful one — sets the per-bomb cost. Cracked shells have a proud second life as 'snowman soup' jars at a seconds price, and the ledger tracks that too.
Can I sell year-round?
Some makers run birthday and movie-night bombs through the year at a trickle. Channel history will tell you honestly whether off-season bombs earn their bench time or just keep the molds from feeling lonely.
Ready to see your real numbers?
The app is live. $19/mo, kept for as long as you stay.