If you're a home baker or cottage food producer looking for tools to grow your business, there's a decent chance My Custom Bakes has come up in your research. It's a well-built platform with a loyal following among custom order bakers. And if you've also come across Butter & Sage Market, you might be wondering: what's the actual difference, and which one belongs in your business toolkit?

Short answer: they solve very different problems. Here's what you need to know.

What My Custom Bakes Does

My Custom Bakes (MCB) is a seller-side business management tool. It's designed to help cottage food producers — especially custom order bakers — manage the operational side of their business: taking custom orders, collecting payments, managing your calendar, and organizing client communication. It costs $10/month (or $110/year) and it's genuinely good at what it does.

Think of MCB as your back office. It helps you handle what happens after someone decides to order from you: the intake form, the payment, the scheduling. It also provides a basic storefront page where customers can submit orders directly.

What MCB doesn't do: it's not a discovery platform. Your MCB store page doesn't appear in a marketplace where shoppers are browsing. New customers can't stumble onto your products while shopping around. The platform helps you manage existing customers and handle inbound orders — not find you new ones.

What Butter & Sage Market Does

Butter & Sage Market is a full two-sided marketplace — think of it as Etsy specifically for small and cottage food businesses. Vendors open shops, list products, and get discovered by shoppers who are actively looking for local, homemade food. The platform also includes a Farmers Market directory, event listings for cooking classes and pop-ups, and an editorial content hub focused on whole food cooking.

The key difference from MCB is discovery. On Butter & Sage Market, you're not just managing the customers you already have — you're getting in front of new ones. Shoppers come to the marketplace looking for local food, browse by location and category, and find vendors they never would have discovered otherwise. That's a fundamentally different value than order management software.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Customer Discovery: MCB doesn't offer marketplace discovery — customers need to already know about you to find your page. Butter & Sage Market is a discovery platform first, connecting shoppers actively searching for local food products with vendors in their area.

Custom Order Management: MCB is built specifically for complex custom orders (think: decorated birthday cakes with multi-step intake forms and deposit schedules). Butter & Sage Market handles offers the option to categorize a product as a custom order. A special order form is provided for those products that allow the customer to provide specific details for their custom order, in addition to attaching files and inspiration photos. Vendors can send order invoices to the customer allowing them to finalize and pay for the order. MCB allows the user to customize their order forms - if customization of the order form is needed, MCB has a deeper feature set here.

Farmers Market Connection: Butter & Sage Market includes a full Farmers Market directory where vendors can list their market appearances and link their online shop — connecting the in-person and online experience. MCB has no equivalent feature.

Events and Classes: If you teach cooking classes or host pop-up markets, Butter & Sage Market lets you list and sell tickets to events directly through the platform. MCB doesn't offer event functionality.

Pricing: MCB costs $10/month. Butter & Sage Market vendor pricing — check current plans here.

The "right tool" question: MCB is a business management tool. Butter & Sage Market is a marketplace and community. These are different categories of software solving different problems.

Can You Use Both?

Honestly? Yes, and some vendors do. If you take a lot of complex custom orders AND want a presence on a food marketplace where new shoppers can discover you, using both tools is a reasonable approach. MCB handles your custom order workflow; Butter & Sage handles your marketplace presence and discovery.

That said, if you're just getting started and choosing one place to put your energy: if you need customers to find you, start with a marketplace. If you have a steady customer base and need better order management, a tool like MCB fills a real gap.

The Bottom Line

My Custom Bakes is a solid product with a clear purpose: it helps you manage custom orders efficiently. If custom cakes are your whole business, it's worth a look.

Butter & Sage Market is built around the belief that great local food producers deserve to be discovered — not just by the customers who already know them, but by the whole community looking for exactly what they make. If growth and visibility matter to you, that's where we live.

We're also the only platform that combines a buyer marketplace, seller tools, a Farmers Market directory, events, and editorial content in one place. No one else has all five. And that combination is not an accident — it's built around how local food actually moves in communities.

Either way, you deserve tools that help you spend less time on logistics and more time doing what you're actually great at.

— Amy

Fresh. Local. Sustainable.