About Sourdough Pricer

Sourdough Pricer is a free pricing calculator built by a home baker and developer. It started with a simple question: what should a loaf actually cost? Every spreadsheet out there was either too simple (just ingredients) or too complicated (30 tabs for a hobby bakery). So the tool that should have existed got built.

Why This Exists

Most home bakers start the same way. You bake a great loaf, friends ask to buy one, and suddenly you need a price. You Google “how much to charge for sourdough” and get forum posts saying “3x your ingredients.” So you charge $6 for a loaf that took you 90 minutes of active work. At that price, you’re paying yourself less than minimum wage.

The problem is not that bakers are bad at math. It’s that the standard advice ignores the biggest cost: your time. Sourdough is unusually labor-intensive compared to other baked goods. The mixing, stretch-and-folds, shaping, scoring, and oven management add up fast. A pricing tool that doesn’t account for labor is worse than no tool at all, because it gives you false confidence in a bad number.

Sourdough Pricer was built to fix that. It tracks every real cost (ingredients, labor with active vs. passive time separated, starter maintenance, energy, packaging, and overhead) and shows you a true per-loaf cost. Then it lets you set a price and instantly see what you’re actually paying yourself per hour.

What Makes This Different

• Built for sourdough specifically. Not a generic bakery calculator. We account for starter maintenance, long fermentation schedules, and the active/passive time split that makes sourdough unique.
• Honest about labor. The calculator separates active hands-on time from passive waiting time. You shouldn’t charge $20/hr for bulk fermentation when you’re watching TV, but you also shouldn’t work for free during the 15 minutes of shaping and scoring.
• Free and private. No signup, no email capture, no paywall. Your recipe data stays in your browser’s local storage and never touches a server.
• Data-backed content. The guides and blog posts on this site use real pricing data, Bureau of Labor Statistics wage benchmarks, and USDA commodity data, not guesswork.

Who This Is For

Sourdough Pricer is built for home bakers who sell (or want to sell) their bread. That includes:

• Farmer’s market sellers figuring out what price covers their booth fee, gas, and time
• Cottage food bakers pricing loaves for local pre-orders
• Hobby bakers who sell to friends and want to stop feeling guilty about charging
• Micro-bakery owners scaling up and needing real unit economics

Whether you bake 4 loaves a week or 100, the math works the same way. Ingredients + labor + overhead = cost. Price above cost = sustainable business. Price below cost = expensive hobby.

The Content

Beyond the calculator, this site has in-depth guides and blog posts on sourdough pricing. Every article is research-driven and backed by public data. No fluff, no filler content, no advice that sounds good but doesn’t hold up when you run the numbers.

The most popular articles:

• How Much to Charge for Sourdough Bread: regional pricing data and a tiered pricing framework
• Sourdough Cost Breakdown: a real recipe costed line by line
• Profit Margin Guide: realistic margins at 10, 50, and 100 loaves/week

Get in Touch

Have feedback, a pricing question, or a suggestion for a new feature? Reach out via the contact page.