Platform comparison · Reviewed September 2026
Short answer
For almost every home bakery, Square is the cheaper of the two. Square Free costs $0/month and charges 3.3% + $0.30 online. Shopify Basic costs $29/month billed yearly and charges 2.9% + $0.30. That 0.4% difference does not repay Shopify’s subscription until you pass roughly $7,250 in online sales per month — a level most cottage bakeries never reach.
Cost is the easy part, though. The harder question is how much bakery-specific work each one leaves you to do by hand.
Square Free
$0/month
3.3% + $0.30 online
Shopify Basic, billed yearly
$29/month
2.9% + $0.30 online
MyPorch Baker
$12/month
2.9% + $0.30 via Stripe
| Orders per month (at $25 each) | Square | Shopify | MyPorch |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 orders | $11.25 | $39.25 | $22.25 |
| 30 orders | $33.75 | $59.75 | $42.75 |
| 60 orders | $67.50 | $90.50 | $73.50 |
Platform and card-processing costs only; taxes, tips, hardware, and paid apps are excluded. Lowest cost in each row is highlighted. MyPorch is shown on its Baker plan; its Free plan covers 10 paid orders per calendar month, so a bakery at the first row pays processing only.
Shopify Basic only becomes cheaper than Square Free once its 0.4% lower rate outruns a $29 monthly bill. That happens at $7,250 of online sales per month, which is about 290 orders at $25 or 121 orders at $60. If you are not selling at that level online, paying Shopify’s subscription to get the better rate costs you money rather than saving it.
Usually, yes — but not for the reason people normally give. Shopify is not too complicated to learn. It is built around a different job. Shopify assumes a catalog of products that are in stock, bought whenever a customer likes, and shipped. A cottage bakery usually sells the opposite: a short menu, available for one weekend, capped by how much you can physically bake, collected from your porch.
You can absolutely bend Shopify into that shape. Bakers do it every day. The cost is that the bending is your job, and it never fully stops being your job — every new batch is another round of configuration rather than a repeat of last week.
Square sits closer to a bakery’s reality out of the box. Square Free includes an ordering page with pickup and local-delivery windows, which covers a lot of ground for a baker whose customers collect in person. If a market booth or a counter is where most of your money changes hands, Square is the sensible centre of gravity and this comparison probably ends there.
Both Square and Shopify are general commerce platforms, and both are good at being that. Neither is built around the two things that actually consume a cottage baker’s week.
A list of paid orders is not a bake list. Somebody still has to total the quantities per item, work out the shopping, and sequence Saturday morning. On a general platform that somebody is you, usually in a spreadsheet beside the dashboard.
Neither platform’s reviewed pricing page documents a cottage-food label workflow, so this comparison marks that field unverified rather than claiming it is absent. Either way, the label rules are set by your state and meeting them stays your responsibility.
That gap is the entire reason MyPorch exists, and it is also the honest limit of this page: if your bakery is mostly in-person and you do not mind assembling the rest, Square Free is a perfectly good answer and costs less than we do. Read up on what your label legally needs before you decide, whichever platform you pick.
Choose Square if
Online and in-person processing rates differ, and bakery-specific production or label work remains separate.
Choose Shopify if
Bakery-specific preorder, pickup, and label workflows may require setup or additional apps.
Choose MyPorch if
The free plan is capped at 10 paid orders each calendar month.
For most cottage bakers, yes. Shopify Basic runs $29/month billed yearly and is built for catalog retail and shipping. A home bakery selling one weekly batch for local pickup uses very little of that, and the bakery-specific parts still have to be assembled from settings or paid apps.
Square, for almost every home bakery. Square Free has no monthly cost but charges 3.3% + $0.30 online, while Shopify Basic charges $29/month plus 2.9% + $0.30. That 0.4% gap only overtakes the subscription past roughly $7,250 in online sales per month, which is well beyond most cottage bakeries.
Yes. Shopify does not restrict baked goods, and cottage-food sellers do use it. The constraint is not permission, it is fit: you are configuring a general ecommerce platform to behave like a weekly preorder batch, and cottage-food label rules remain your responsibility either way.
Square works well when in-person selling anchors the business, since the same account covers a market booth and an online ordering page. Square Free includes pickup and local-delivery ordering windows. Cottage-food labeling is still separate work that Square does not generate for you.
Sources · Reviewed September 2026
Pricing and features change. Verify current terms on each provider’s site before deciding.
Start with 10 paid orders per month free. No credit card required.
Keep comparing in our home-bakery tools guide, see MyPorch vs Hotplate, compare the bakery-specific tools in Bakesy vs Hotplate, or plan the workflow itself with how to take pre-orders.
