You priced out Shopify, saw the monthly bill, and wondered whether a home bakery selling cookies and cinnamon rolls really needs all that. It doesn't. But the answer isn't a free form either, and here is why.
Shopify is built for a warehouse. You have a kitchen.
Shopify assumes you hold stock and ship parcels. Before you can take one order you configure a catalogue, tax rules, shipping and pickup settings, checkout, and a theme built for retail. None of that is one evening. If you have never built an online store, it is weeks of evenings, a pile of help articles, and at least one setting that breaks something quietly. You pay $49 CAD a month the whole time, for software where the thing you actually do (a batch on Friday, picked up Saturday) is the edge case.
What a home bakery actually needs
- A page that looks like your business. Your logo, your cover photo, your colour, your own link. Customers decide whether to trust you in about four seconds.
- Photos of what you bake, grouped into categories they can browse.
- A sold-out switch, so Saturday's batch stops selling at forty without you deleting the item.
- Payment at checkout, by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, so an order is an order.
- A confirmation email with your name on it, so the customer has something to hold on to.
- A record of who ordered, so your regulars aren't strangers the second time.
The honest cost comparison
| Option | Monthly | Per order | Setup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Basic | $49 CAD ($37 billed yearly) | 2.8% + 30¢ | Weeks of evenings |
| Square Online | $0 to start | 2.8% + 30¢ | Days to weeks, retail settings |
| Google Form | $0 | No payment at all | 20 minutes |
| Swaddra | $0 | $1.50 per card order, cash free | 15 minutes to an hour |
Why a Google Form isn't the cheap option
It's free because it does almost nothing. A form can't show a photo of your croissants, can't be browsed, can't take payment, can't tell a customer their pickup time, and can't remember that they ordered last month. It collects answers. It doesn't sell anything, and it quietly tells every customer that this is a hobby.
Take bakery orders online
Your menu, payments, and pickups in one shareable link. No website needed.
Get started freeSee an example storeWhere Swaddra fits
Swaddra does the list above and deliberately not much else. You get a branded storefront at your own link with your logo, cover photo and colour, two templates to pick from, card and wallet payments, automatic confirmation emails to every customer, a customer list that builds itself, promo codes, deposits and review requests that show up as real social proof on your page. The free plan takes $1.50 per card order, and cash orders are free. Pro is $11.99 a month with no per-order fee. See the full breakdown.
Words only go so far here, so take a look at a real Swaddra storefront. That's Browkies, and it's the same page a customer would land on from an Instagram bio: the menu, the photos, the categories, the options, the checkout. We've deliberately switched payment off on this demo store so nobody accidentally orders brownies that will never be baked. Everything else is exactly what your customers would see.
When Shopify is still the right answer
If you ship across the country, carry non-food products, or run paid ads into a real funnel, Shopify earns its price and we'd tell you to stay. If everything you sell leaves your kitchen in somebody's hands, you're paying a warehouse bill for a bake sale.
The test is simple. Does anything you sell go in a box to a stranger's address? If not, you don't need an e-commerce platform. You need a storefront that makes you look like the business you already are.