The short version: Big Cartel is $15 a month for Platinum or $12 billed annually, which is $144 a year. Diamond is $30 monthly or $24 annually, or $288 a year. There is a 7-day free trial on Platinum monthly, a free limited Gold plan, and 0% commission on every plan. Big Cartel does not set your card rate: you connect your own provider, so your total is $144 plus whatever they charge. The Diamond upgrade costs $144 a year and buys abandoned-cart recovery, scheduled product drops, password-protected products, Zapier, and priority support. For a food business selling limited batches, that drop scheduling is usually the reason.
Figures came from Big Cartel's own pricing page, verified 23 July 2026.
Two paid plans, a free tier, and no commission anywhere.
| Big Cartel | |
|---|---|
| Subscription | Platinum $15/mo, or $12/mo billed annually ($144/yr, save 20%). Diamond $30/mo, or $24/mo billed annually ($288/yr, save 20%). A free limited Gold plan also exists |
| Free trial | 7 days free on Platinum, then $15/mo. The annual option signs you up directly rather than starting a trial |
| Platform fee | $0. No commission on any plan |
| Card processing | Not set by Big Cartel. You connect your own provider; checkout accepts cards, PayPal, Afterpay, and more |
That last row is the structural thing to understand. Big Cartel is not a payments company, so it does not mark up your rate and it does not penalise you for bringing your own. Whatever your processor charges is what you pay.
Yes, straightforwardly, and unusually so for this category.
The 20% saving means Platinum drops from $180 to $144 a year, and Diamond from $360 to $288. So annual pays for itself after 9.6 months on either plan.
The seasonal exception applies here as it does everywhere: if you trade for fewer than about ten months, monthly costs less. A baker running an October-to-December holiday shop pays $45 monthly against $144 annually, so monthly saves them $99.
One thing to notice in the sequencing. The 7-day trial appears on the monthly option, and the annual option signs you up directly. If you want to try before committing, start monthly, use the trial, and switch to annual once you know. Nothing is lost by that order, and $144 is a real commitment for a business that has not taken an order yet.
Seven things, for $12 a month annually, or $144 a year.
Two of those can pay for themselves.
Scheduled product drops is the one that matters most for food. You set when a product becomes available and it appears then, which is exactly the mechanic a Friday-bake, Saturday-sell business runs on. Shopify has no native equivalent and needs an app to do it; Big Cartel includes it at $24 a month annually.
The honest limit: this is timed availability, not the full drop apparatus. There is no countdown, no live demand display, no waitlist when you sell out, and no automatic text reminder. If those are what you need, a dedicated drop tool does more. Our guide to running a weekly food drop covers what the model genuinely requires, which is usually less than vendors assume.
Abandoned cart recovery is the other. At $1,000 a month in sales, Diamond's $12 monthly premium is covered if recovery adds 1.2% to your revenue, which is a plausible rather than an optimistic bar for most stores. Whether you clear it depends on your traffic, but it is a real return rather than a hopeful one.
The other five are convenience. Buy Diamond for drops or abandoned carts; if neither applies, Platinum is the right plan.
More than Big Cartel's reputation suggests, and this is the most common misconception about it.
Platinum includes:
Big Cartel is often described as bare-bones and that description is out of date. In-person selling from your phone, at $144 a year with no commission, is a genuinely useful combination for a vendor who does markets and online orders.
Honest answer: the pricing page names it and does not define it, so ask before you rely on it.
Sales tax involves three separate jobs, and they are very different amounts of work:
Most platforms do the first. Very few do the second and third. A feature name containing "autopilot" does not tell you which of the three it covers, and the difference is hours of your life every quarter.
So put it directly to their support before you assume: does it calculate, does it file, and does it remit, and in which states. That is a two-minute question with an answer worth having in writing, and it is the single most important clarification on this whole page.
Whichever answer comes back, the obligation itself is yours. Our guides to sales tax nexus for online food sales and reporting your food sales taxes cover what you are actually responsible for, and sales tax at farmers markets covers the in-person half, which matters here because Platinum lets you take payments from your phone at a stall.
Since Big Cartel does not set your card rate, the total depends on your processor. At $1,000 a month across 40 orders with a common 2.9% plus 30¢ rate:
Notice that processing is roughly three times the Platinum subscription. If you want to reduce what selling costs you, that is where the money is, and the lever is order size rather than platform choice. The 30¢ is fixed, so it costs 1.2% on a $25 order and 0.3% on a $100 one.
Because you bring your own processor, a rate you negotiated elsewhere carries straight over here. That is worth real money against platforms that either set your rate or charge you for not using theirs. Our comparison of Shopify against Big Cartel covers Shopify's 2% penalty for using an outside processor, which is $360 a year at this volume.
At $12,000 a year in sales across 480 orders, using a 2.9% plus 30¢ processor throughout:
Big Cartel is the cheapest of the general-purpose builders by roughly $200 a year, and it is within $5 of the bakery-specific option. That is a strong position for a platform whose reputation is that it does less.
What you give up against Shopify and Wix is the app ecosystem, multi-channel selling into marketplaces, and depth in inventory and shipping rate rules. For a food business with a small catalog, most of that is capacity you would not use.
It exists and it is described as limited, but the pricing page does not spell out where the limits sit.
Historically Big Cartel's free tier has capped the number of products you can list, which is the usual shape of these things. Since the current limits are not on the page, treat Gold as a way to build and look at your shop rather than as a plan to run a business on, and confirm the caps before you plan around it.
For most food sellers the practical route is: build on Gold, see whether the shop feels right, then move to Platinum monthly for the trial, then annual once you are sure. That sequence costs nothing until you are confident.
Worth using that free window on something more useful than admiring your own shop. Load your real products, take one order through end to end, and check the whole thing on a phone. If you want a genuine comparison rather than a sequential one, run the same weekend of orders through a flat-fee storefront in parallel and compare two real totals instead of two pricing pages.
The honest read on the tier: Gold at five products with no discount codes is a demo, not a store, and Big Cartel prices it knowing you will outgrow it in your first busy month.
Worth naming, because the pricing only makes sense once you see the intended customer.
Big Cartel has aimed at artists and independent makers since 2005: someone with a small, distinctive catalog who wants a shop that looks like theirs and does not want to run an e-commerce operation. Everything in the product follows from that. The catalog tools are shallow because makers do not have four hundred SKUs. The design is simple because the products carry the page. There is no marketplace because the audience arrives from the maker's own following.
That description fits a great many food businesses almost exactly. A jam maker with six flavours, a baker with a short menu, a hot sauce producer with three labels: all of them have a maker's catalog rather than a retailer's, and all of them bring their own audience.
Where it fits badly is anything operationally complicated. Multiple pickup points, a delivery round, per-day production caps, or a subscription box are all outside what this product was built to do, and no plan tier changes that. Neither is national shipping at scale, though the unlimited discounted label printing on Platinum makes modest shipping genuinely painless.
One thing worth settling early if you are building a maker-style brand on it. Your shop name is doing a lot of work when the products carry the page, and finding out that someone else registered it two years into trading is an expensive discovery. The USPTO's trademark basics covers how to search existing marks and what registration actually protects. And since Platinum lets you sell digital products, if you plan to add recipe cards or an e-book alongside the food, the Copyright Office's registration guidance covers what protection those files have by default and what registering adds.
That third one is the recurring problem for local vendors. A Wednesday market, a Saturday market, and porch pickup on Sunday means three schedules and three cutoffs, and on Big Cartel you end up encoding that into product names or typing it into an order note.
If that is your week, 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 is not a general storefront builder. There is no digital-product selling, no shipping-label printing, no Zapier, no drop scheduling, and it does not ship nationally. If you sell prints or downloads alongside the food, or ship parcels, Big Cartel does things it does not. You can put one order weekend through it during a Big Cartel trial and compare on your own orders rather than on two pricing pages.
The default answer for most food businesses is Platinum annual at $144, moving to Diamond only when scheduled drops or abandoned-cart recovery become genuinely relevant. Buying Diamond on day one, before you have traffic to recover or a release schedule to automate, is $144 a year for capability you are not using yet.
Platinum is $15 a month, or $12 a month billed annually, which is $144 a year. Diamond is $30 monthly, or $24 annually, which is $288. There is also a free limited Gold plan.
No. Big Cartel takes 0% commission on every plan. You connect your own payment provider and pay that provider directly, so your rate depends entirely on who you connect.
It saves 20%, which is $36 a year on Platinum and $72 on Diamond, and it breaks even at 9.6 months. If your season is shorter than ten months, monthly costs less.
Scheduled product drops, abandoned cart recovery, password-protected products, automatic discounts, advanced discount logic, Zapier, and prioritised support. For food sellers, drop scheduling is usually the reason.
Its pricing page lists a feature called "Sales tax autopilot" but does not define its scope. Ask their support whether it calculates, files, or remits, and in which states, before you rely on it.
On Diamond, yes, in the sense of scheduling when a product becomes available. There are no countdowns, live demand displays, waitlists, or SMS reminders, so it is timed availability rather than a full drop system.
Yes, called Gold, described as free with limited features. The current limits are not spelled out on the pricing page, so confirm them before planning around it.
Big Cartel at $144 a year is the cheapest credible general-purpose storefront for a small food business, roughly $200 less than Squarespace, Shopify, or Wix, and it takes no commission at all. Because it does not set your card rate, a good rate you already have carries straight over.
Diamond at $288 is worth it for one reason most of the time: scheduled product drops, which Shopify needs an app to match. Abandoned-cart recovery can justify it too, at about a 1.2% revenue lift. If neither applies to how you sell, stay on Platinum.
Before you commit to a year, ask one question in writing: what does "Sales tax autopilot" actually do. Calculating, filing, and remitting are three different jobs, only one of them is common in this category, and the answer decides how much work you are really buying.
