The short version: Payout speed is mostly a property of your payment processor, not your storefront, and the question that decides it is whether the platform holds your money first. Two structures exist. If you connect your own processor account, as with LocallyGrown.net, Big Cartel, or Bake.Shop via Stripe, the money is yours on that processor's schedule and no platform sits in between. If the platform runs the payments, it decides when you get paid. Paying to go faster is expensive: Cheddar Up charges 1.95% with a $1 minimum for instant withdrawal, which is $19.50 on a $1,000 payout, while its standard bank transfer is free on every plan.
All figures came from each company's own pricing pages in July 2026.
Three things, and the platform is only one of them.
The middle one is largely fixed and is not really a platform decision. The first one is entirely a platform decision, and it is the one worth choosing on.
Payout speed is settled by which processor holds your money, so this is one of the few comparisons where the platform choice is the whole answer. Our platform cost-per-order guide covers the fee half of the same decision.
Worth understanding properly, because it affects more than speed.
You own the processor account. LocallyGrown.net has you connect your own Stripe account. Big Cartel has you connect your own provider. Bake.Shop routes through Stripe and says plainly that the 2.9% plus 30¢ goes to Stripe rather than to them. In this structure:
The platform runs payments. Square, Shopify Payments, Hotplate, and Bakesy Secure Payments all sit in this category. In this structure:
Neither is better in the abstract. The connected-account model gives you control and no intermediary standing between you and your customers' money. The platform-payments model gives you faster setup and a buffer between you and the card networks when something goes wrong.
Enough that it should be an occasional decision rather than a default.
Cheddar Up publishes both: standard bank withdrawal is free on every plan, and instant withdrawal is 1.95% with a $1 minimum. On a $1,000 payout that is $19.50 to get the money a couple of days sooner.
Work that out annually. A vendor withdrawing $2,000 a month and always choosing instant pays $39 a month, or $468 a year, purely for timing. That is more than three years of a $144 storefront subscription, spent on nothing but impatience.
Instant transfer options at other processors are priced similarly, generally in the 1% to 2% range. The pattern holds: speed is sold at roughly 2%, and 2% of your revenue is a large number.
The honest exception: if the alternative is missing an ingredient order and cancelling a bake, $19.50 is cheap. Occasional use for a genuine cash-flow gap is sensible. Standing use is an expensive habit that nobody audits.
Because the processor is carrying the risk, and it is worth knowing before it happens to you.
When you take a card payment, the processor pays you before it is certain the transaction will stick. If the customer disputes it, the processor is exposed. So new accounts, unusual patterns, and sudden volume spikes often trigger a longer settlement window or a reserve.
What tends to cause it:
The practical protections are dull and effective: verify your account fully before your first big week, keep your business description accurate, and do not launch a holiday campaign the same week you open a payment account. A December spike on a two-week-old account is the classic way to have your busiest month's money held until January.
Less than most people think, and the honest answer depends on whether you buy ingredients before or after you sell.
Pre-order businesses have this solved already. If customers pay on Monday for a Saturday collection, the money arrives before you buy flour. Payout timing is irrelevant because you are never funding stock out of your own pocket. This is the strongest argument for the pre-order model and it is rarely framed this way.
Buy-then-sell businesses feel it. If you buy ingredients Wednesday, bake Friday, sell Saturday, and get paid Tuesday, you are funding a week of stock continuously. That is a working-capital problem, and a two-day faster payout genuinely helps.
Market vendors with card readers are usually fine, since in-person settlement tends to be quick and volume is predictable enough that a two-day lag never becomes a gap you notice.
So before paying 2% for speed, ask whether you can change the shape of the business instead. Moving even half your sales to pre-order does more for cash flow than any instant transfer, and it costs nothing. Our guide to the weekly drop and pre-order pickup model covers how that works in practice.
Deposits are the halfway house for anything custom. A 50% deposit on a wedding cake taken at the point of booking funds the ingredients regardless of when the balance settles, and it also filters out enquiries that were never going to become orders. Our guide to deposits and partial payments on custom food orders covers how to structure it, and if your current tool cannot take a partial payment, that is a genuine reason to change platforms, which a trial will settle in one booking.
Worth counting, because for most vendors it dwarfs anything payout timing costs them.
Unpaid orders are a cash-flow problem that looks like a customer-service problem. If you take orders by message and collect payment on the day, some proportion simply never happens: the customer forgets, changes plans, or quietly disappears, and you have already baked it.
Put numbers on it. At 40 orders a month at $25, a 5% no-show rate is $50 a month of product made and not sold, or $600 a year, plus the ingredients. That is larger than the $468 a year an instant-transfer habit costs, and unlike payout speed it is entirely fixable by taking payment at the point of order.
Which produces the ranking that matters: collect at order, then worry about payout speed. A business that is paid before it bakes has no working-capital problem to solve, and everything on this page becomes a detail rather than a decision.
Six questions, and most people ask none of them until something goes wrong.
Question five catches people out when they switch platforms. Leaving with money in flight, in a system you no longer log into, is an avoidable annoyance and a two-minute question before you sign up.
Question six matters more than its position suggests. A chargeback is decided on evidence, and the evidence is your order record: what was bought, when it was collected, and what the customer agreed to. A platform that keeps a clean order history and lets you respond directly puts you in a far better position than one where you find out about a dispute after it has been resolved against you. Ask specifically whether you get to submit a response, or whether it is handled for you.
The FDIC's consumer resource center is a reasonable plain-language reference on how deposits and payments actually work, and Treasury's ACH guidance covers the bank-transfer rails that most payouts ultimately run on. Neither is thrilling reading and both are useful the first time a payout does not arrive when you expected.
Choose a connected account you own if:
LocallyGrown.net, Big Cartel, and Bake.Shop all work this way.
Choose platform-run payments if:
Square, Shopify, Hotplate, and Bakesy Secure Payments all work this way. Our Bakesy pricing breakdown covers an unusual middle case: its card processing is optional, so you can take payment yourself and skip the question entirely.
Ranked by return, and none of the top three is a software purchase.
Our piece on seasonal ingredient cost budgeting covers the planning side, and our look at whether farmers markets are actually profitable works through the real numbers on a stall.
If what you want is payment taken at the point of order so cash arrives before you buy ingredients, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: it does not offer instant payouts as a paid option, it has no point-of-sale for card payments at a stall, and it does not ship nationally. Payout timing follows standard card settlement rather than anything faster. If same-day access to funds is genuinely critical, a processor with a paid instant-transfer option gives you that lever and this does not. You can run one order weekend through a trial and see when the money actually lands rather than taking anyone's word on a number of days.
Every platform below shows the same four commercial facts, because a table that lists one platform's transaction fee and not another's is not a comparison. "Not published" means exactly that: the company does not state it publicly.
| Platform | How fast money reaches you | Subscription (annual) | Free trial | Platform fee | Card processing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homegrown | Standard card settlement, no instant-payout product | $10/mo billed annually | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee (0% commission) | 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Square Online | Next business day standard, instant for a fee | Free tier; paid from $29/mo per location | 30-day trial on paid plans | $0 platform fee | 3.3% + $0.30 free tier, 2.9% + $0.30 paid |
| Cheddar Up | Instant withdrawal 1.95%, minimum $1 | Basic $0; Pro $15/mo annual | No trial needed, Basic is free | $0 platform fee | 3.95% + $0.95 Basic, 3.59% + $0.59 Pro processing |
| Shopify | Payout schedule varies by plan and region | $29/mo Basic | 3-day trial, then $1/mo for 3 | 2% platform fee if not on Shopify Payments | from 2.9% + $0.30 processing |
| Big Cartel | Your own processor pays you, so their schedule | Platinum $12/mo ($144/yr) | 7-day free trial | $0 platform fee | Your own provider, so 2.9% + $0.30 typical |
| LocallyGrown | Your own Stripe account pays you directly | $0 | n/a, free to start | 3% commission after the first $15,000 | 2.9% + $0.30 processing, your own Stripe |
Usually a couple of business days, set by the payment processor rather than the storefront. New accounts often settle more slowly while the processor establishes a history, and some hold a reserve.
LocallyGrown.net has you connect your own Stripe account, and Bake.Shop routes through Stripe with the fee going to Stripe rather than to them. Big Cartel has you connect your own provider, whichever that is.
Cheddar Up charges 1.95% with a $1 minimum, which is $19.50 on a $1,000 payout, against free for standard bank transfer. Instant options elsewhere are generally in the same 1% to 2% range.
Most often because the account is new, the volume spiked suddenly, or the order values are outside your usual range. Verifying the account fully before a busy period is the main protection.
Much less. If customers pay days before collection, money arrives before you buy ingredients and you are never funding stock yourself. That is a stronger cash-flow fix than any payout setting.
Ask before you sign up. Leaving with money in flight through a system you no longer use is avoidable, and the answer varies by whether the platform or you owns the processor account.
Occasionally, when the alternative is a missed ingredient order. As a standing habit it costs roughly 2% of revenue, which at $2,000 a month is $468 a year for timing alone.
Payout speed is set by your processor, not your storefront. What the platform decides is whether it holds your money first, and that is the question worth asking before you sign up.
Connected-account platforms like LocallyGrown.net, Big Cartel, and Bake.Shop put money into an account you own, on the processor's schedule, with nobody in between. Platform-run payments trade that control for faster setup and mediated disputes. Both are reasonable; only one of them can delay you.
Paying for speed is the expensive answer. Cheddar Up's instant withdrawal is 1.95%, or $468 a year on $2,000 a month, against free for the standard transfer. Before buying that, take payment at order rather than at collection. It is a settings change, it costs nothing, and it fixes the underlying problem instead of renting a workaround.
