🧁 CookingCost

Yes — CookingCost is completely free to use. Every core feature including the recipe builder, cost calculator, allergen detection, unit converter, waste calculator, batch scaling, and recipe saving is available at no cost.

We offer a Pro upgrade ($4.99/month or $29.99/year) that unlocks Baker's Percentage analysis and AI-powered recipe suggestions. But the free version is genuinely powerful and always will be.

No account is required to start using CookingCost immediately. Just go to cookingcost.com and start building your recipe right away.

Creating a free account lets you save your recipes to the cloud so they're accessible from any device. Without an account, recipes are saved locally on your device.

Absolutely — CookingCost is designed mobile-first. It works beautifully on iPhone, Android, and any tablet or desktop browser. No app download required — just open cookingcost.com in your phone's browser.

That's our Keep Screen Awake feature — tap the ☀️ button in the header to activate it. It prevents your phone from going to sleep while you're in the middle of baking and referencing the app. No more unlocking your phone with floury hands!

It's simple — for each ingredient enter three things: the store package size, the price you paid, and how much your recipe actually uses. CookingCost does the math automatically, calculating exactly what portion of each package went into your recipe.

For example: a 5 lb bag of flour costs $4.99. Your recipe uses 2 cups. CookingCost figures out exactly what 2 cups cost you from that bag.

This depends on your business goals, but here are common benchmarks for cottage food businesses:

30-40% — Good starting point for new bakers building a customer base.

40-55% — Healthy margin once you've established your market.

55%+ — Premium pricing, great for specialty or artisan products with unique value.

Yes — absolutely. Your time has value. A common approach is to add a "labor" ingredient to your recipe. For example, add "Labor — 2 hours" at your desired hourly rate. If you want to earn $15/hour and the recipe takes 2 hours, add a custom ingredient called "Labor" priced at $30.

This is one of the most important things home bakers miss when pricing their products.

The waste calculator compares your total batter/dough weight against your expected yield. For example — if your cookie recipe makes 42 oz of dough but you plan to make 12 cookies at 4 oz each (48 oz total), you'll run short. Or if you have 52 oz of dough for 12 cookies, you have 4 oz of excess.

Knowing this upfront means no surprises mid-bake, and more accurate costing — because wasted ingredients are still costs.

Yes! Use the Batch Scale selector when building your recipe. You can scale to ½×, 1×, 1.5×, 2×, 3×, or 4× and every quantity and cost updates automatically. Perfect for when a customer orders a double batch or you want to see if it's worth making a larger batch for a market.

This is one of CookingCost's most powerful features. It lets you use a saved recipe as an ingredient inside another recipe.

For example — save your cinnamon roll filling as its own recipe. Then when you build the full cinnamon roll recipe, add the filling as an ingredient. CookingCost pulls in the exact cost of the filling automatically, giving you the complete true cost of the finished product.

This mirrors how professional kitchens cost "sub-recipes" — and now home bakers can do it too.

CookingCost automatically scans your ingredient names and flags all 9 major allergens recognized by the FDA: Gluten, Dairy, Eggs, Peanuts, Tree Nuts, Soy, Fish, Shellfish, and Sesame.

The allergen check also works across nested recipes — if your cinnamon roll filling contains dairy, your rolls will flag dairy too.

Yes — CookingCost has two print options on the result screen:

🔒 My Cost Sheet — a full breakdown with all costs, suggested pricing, profit margins, and your business info. For your eyes only.

👤 Customer Sheet — a beautiful ingredient list with allergen information and organic callouts, but no costs shown. Perfect to hand to customers or include with orders.

The built-in unit converter lets you quickly convert between grams, ounces, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, pounds, and more — right inside each ingredient row. No need to open a separate calculator or browser tab. Tap "⚖️ Convert units" on any ingredient to expand it.

Absolutely. Your recipes are completely private. When using local storage (no account), your recipes never leave your device. With a cloud account, your recipes are protected by row-level security — meaning only you can see your recipes. We never have access to your recipe content, pricing strategies, or ingredient data.

Your recipes are yours. Period.

CookingCost Pro is our premium upgrade that unlocks advanced features including Baker's Percentage Calculator, AI-powered recipe analysis, step-by-step recipe generation, ingredient swap suggestions, and printable recipe cards with full instructions.

Pro is $4.99/month or $29.99/year (saving you over 33%).

Baker's percentages are a professional technique where flour always equals 100% and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight. This tells you at a glance whether your dough will be too wet, too dry, too sweet, or too rich — before you even start baking.

For example, bread hydration of 65-75% produces a standard loaf. 80%+ makes a very wet, open-crumb artisan bread. Below 60% and your dough will be stiff and dense.

CookingCost Pro shows these percentages live as you add ingredients, with plain-English feedback on what to expect.

When you hit "Analyze with AI," CookingCost sends your complete recipe — ingredients, quantities, ratios, and costs — to Claude AI (built by Anthropic). Claude analyzes your recipe and returns a full report including ratio feedback, step-by-step instructions, ingredient swap suggestions, improvement tips, and a pro baking tip specific to your recipe.

It's like having a professional pastry chef review your recipe — instantly.

Yes — cancel anytime with no penalties. Your Pro access continues until the end of your billing period. After cancellation you return to the free tier and keep all your saved recipes.