# What to charge for custom baking > Practical guidance, not accounting advice. Last updated 19 August 2026. Cost your ingredients properly, multiply by three or four, then do the step almost nobody does: divide what is left by the hours it took. That number is what your price is actually paying you. ## Cost the ingredients exactly Pack price divided by pack size, times the amount used. A $12 bag holding 2 kg of flour is 0.6 cents a gram, so 500 g is $3.00. **You cannot convert cups into grams.** A cup of flour and a cup of honey differ by more than a factor of two, so a cup is a question about the substance rather than the unit. If the bag is priced by weight, measure by weight. Anything that converts one to the other for you is guessing. ## "Three times ingredients" means three times, not plus three times Markup means the multiplier to a baker and the added portion to an accountant, and the two differ by exactly one times cost. On $12 of ingredients, "3x" is $36 and "plus 300%" is $48. ## The multiplier is not profit It has to cover your time, the oven, the box, the board, the drive, the shopping trip and the batch that failed. Profit is what is left after those. So do not charge labour and then multiply. Adding your hours, adding overhead, and then applying a markup on top counts your time twice. ## The sum most bakers skip Price, minus ingredients, divided by hours. A two-tier cake with $12 of ingredients priced at 4x is $48. That leaves $36. Over six hours of shopping, baking, chilling and decorating, that is **$6 an hour**, before the box and the electricity. Backwards is more useful: to earn $25 an hour on that cake it has to sell for $162, which is **13.5x ingredients**, not 4x. ## The rule of thumb is not wrong, it is built for a different product A multiplier works where ingredients are a large share of cost and time is small: loaves, cookies, cupcakes on autopilot. Custom decorated work is the reverse, cheap ingredients and enormous time, so a multiplier on cheap ingredients gives a cheap price however large you make it. Sometimes the hourly sum gives a number your market will not pay. That is information, not a reason to ignore it: get faster, simplify the design, sell something else, or decide that one is for love. ## Commonly left out Packaging and boards. The shopping trip. Failed batches. Delivery, especially tiered. Consultation and design time, which is the forty messages before the order. ## Work out yours Pricing calculator, free, nothing saved, no account: Source: