Choosing tools
Hotplate Butter and Crumble: A Fair Roundup of Tools for Home Bakers
See the tools home bakers compare, what to check before you pay, and where the crumble half of the search fits.
On this page
If you landed here, you were probably looking for one of two things and got the other. Maybe you wanted to know what Hotplate is and whether it fits a home baker. Maybe you wanted to bake a crumble and sell a few. Both are worth answering properly, so this page does both without pretending one is the other.
What the search is probably asking
Hotplate shows up in the same conversations as Cottage CMS, Bakesy, Simply Bread, and My Custom Bakes. These are the names home bakers pass around when they are tired of taking orders in their messages and want one place for the order, the payment, and the customer.
The butter and crumble half is the part people forget to plan for. A crumble is one of the easiest things to sell from home, and one of the easiest to underprice if you never wrote down what the butter, fruit, and boxes actually cost you.
The tools you will see, and what to check on each
I am not going to pretend I know every price and every feature of every one of these. What I can do is tell you what to look at, and point you to the comparison pages that go deeper.
Hotplate. Before you sign up, ask what it costs per month, whether it takes a cut of each sale, how you get paid, and what you get on a computer versus a phone. The full breakdown is in Bakesy vs Hotplate and Cottage CMS vs Hotplate.
Cottage CMS. Check whether the price you see is the price you pay after a trial ends, and whether you can move your photos and past orders if you leave.
Bakesy. Read the plans side by side rather than the headline number, and add up the extras. Cost of Bakesy App walks through what to total.
Simply Bread. Worth a look if you sell loaves, less obvious if your table is mostly crumbles, bars, and cookies.
My Custom Bakes. Useful to study for how a home baker’s shop can look, even if you pick something else.
The crumble half of the query
If you are testing a crumble to sell, start with a temperature you can repeat. BBC Good Food’s next level apple crumble heats the oven to 200C, which is 180C fan or gas 6.
Write down the pan size, the batch size, and how many portions you got. That number is what you price from later, and it is much easier to write it down once than to guess it three months from now.
What to remember
- The query is two searches in one, and both deserve a real answer. - Compare tools on monthly price, whether they take a cut, and how you get paid. - Test your crumble at a set temperature and record the portions you got. - A shop you can text as a link is often all a home baker needs to start.
What to write down before you pay for any of them
Ask each one the same four questions. What does it cost per month after the trial. Does it take a percentage of my sales. Can I take cards, and whose account does the money land in. Can I use it on my laptop as well as my phone.
If a company cannot answer those four in plain words, that is your answer.
Why home bakers pick Brevl
Brevl is $20 a month flat, with no cut of your sales and a 14 day free trial that is free to start. It works on a computer and on a phone, so you can build your shop at the kitchen table and take an order from the school pickup line.
You take card payments through your own Stripe or Square account, plus Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, and cash. Your shop is yours to customize with your photos, your colors, and your own web address. Recipes come with real costing, ingredient inventory, and a weekly planner, which is how a crumble gets a real price instead of a guess.
We also set it up with you and move your old shop over, products, photos, reviews, and dates. A real person answers, usually within minutes.
You can see the side by side at Brevl vs Bakesy and read how a move works at Switch. If Hotplate or any of the others fits your baking better, that is a fine outcome too. The point is to know what you are paying for.
One last thing
Sort out which half of the search you meant. If it was the crumble, bake a test batch this week and write down your numbers. If it was the tool, put the four questions to two of them and compare the answers in writing. Either way you end up with something you can use.