The short version: Etsy has no subscription and takes a cut of everything: $0.20 per listing, 6.5% of the item price plus shipping, and 3% plus $0.25 in US processing, which is about $2.83 on a $25 order, or 11.3%. Big Cartel charges $15 a month for Platinum after a 7-day trial, or $30 for Diamond, takes no commission at all, and lets you connect your own payment provider, so your card rate is whatever that provider charges. The break-even is low: past roughly eight orders a month at a $25 average, Big Cartel is cheaper. What you give up by leaving Etsy is its search traffic, and that is the only part of this decision that is genuinely hard.
All figures came from Etsy's own fees and payments pages and Big Cartel's pricing page in July 2026.
One is a marketplace. One is a shop you own the link to.
Etsy is a destination. Millions of people search it directly, and when your listing ranks you get a buyer who was never looking for you specifically. That is the entire value proposition and it is a real one. In exchange, Etsy takes a percentage of every sale, controls the search results, and owns the customer relationship.
Big Cartel is a storefront for makers. Nobody browses it who did not arrive from something you posted or handed out. In exchange you pay a flat monthly fee, keep 100% of the sale minus your own processor's cut, and the customer is yours.
For handmade food specifically:
For shelf-stable food that ships, these are the two obvious candidates, and the fee structures could not be more different. Our Etsy fees breakdown for food sellers adds up the per-sale side in dollars.
Same four disclosures on both.
| Etsy | Big Cartel Platinum | Big Cartel Diamond | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $0. Etsy Plus optional at $10/mo | $15/mo after a 7-day free trial, annual billing also offered | $30/mo |
| Free trial | Not applicable, listing is pay-per-item | 7 days free | No separate trial listed |
| Platform fee | $0.20 per listing, plus 6.5% of item price including shipping and gift wrap. Offsite Ads 15%, or 12% over $10,000 in trailing sales, capped at $100/order | $0, no commission on sales | $0 |
| Card processing | 3% + $0.25 in the US via Etsy Payments | Set by the payment provider you connect | Same |
That last cell is the honest caveat on Big Cartel: it does not process payments itself, so your all-in cost is not knowable from its pricing page alone. Connect a standard provider at 2.9% plus 30 cents and the numbers below hold. Confirm your provider's rate before treating $15 a month as your total.
Worth noting what Big Cartel packs into $15, because it is more than the price suggests: digital products, unlimited shipping label printing at discounted rates, inventory tracking, discount and promo tools, a Google Shopping connection, and a feature it calls Sales tax autopilot. Diamond at $30 adds abandoned cart recovery, scheduled product drops, password-protected products, and Zapier.
Etsy costs about $2.83 per $25 order. Big Cartel costs $15 a month plus roughly $1.03 per order at a standard processing rate.
Setting those equal: $2.83n = $15 + $1.03n, so n is about 8.3 orders a month.
Worked at 40 orders a month at $25, so $1,000 in monthly sales:
Etsy
Big Cartel Platinum
That is a $684 a year difference on identical sales. If Offsite Ads attributes a quarter of your Etsy orders at 15%, add roughly $450 a year to Etsy's side.
Because $684 a year is cheap if Etsy is finding you customers you would not otherwise have.
That is the honest calculation and it is the only one that matters. If a third of your orders come from people who searched Etsy for "small batch hot sauce" and had never heard of you, Etsy is not costing you $684. It is earning you whatever those orders were worth, minus its cut, and very few marketing channels deliver a buyer for 11% of the sale.
The question is who found the customer:
A free way to find out: for one month, put a different link in your bio and on your cards, and watch what happens to your Etsy order count. If it barely moves, Etsy was finding those buyers. If it drops in step, you were.
Being straight about it, since the fee comparison flatters Big Cartel and the traffic comparison does not.
That third point is the one people underweight. A shop that ranks well in Etsy search has built something that took time and cannot be moved. Leaving is not just a fee decision, it is giving up a position.
It is worth being precise about how much of a position, because people overestimate it in both directions. Check your Etsy stats and find the share of visits that came from Etsy search versus from direct links and social. A shop where 70% of traffic is Etsy search has a genuine asset and should think hard before walking away from it. A shop where 70% is direct traffic has been paying a marketplace to process sales it generated, and the position it is protecting is largely imaginary. Most sellers have never looked at that split, and it is the single most decision-relevant number available to them.
The good news is that this is one of the cheaper experiments in small business, because you do not have to close anything to run it.
At $15 a month the whole experiment costs less than one order, and it answers a question that otherwise stays open for years. If your conclusion is that most of your buyers already knew your name, the same logic applies to any channel you do not control, and it is worth seeing what a storefront built around your own link does with the customers you already have.
No, and for a lot of handmade food sellers the right answer is both.
The version that usually works:
At $15 a month, running Big Cartel alongside Etsy costs $180 a year, and it pays for itself the moment it takes about 6 orders a month off Etsy. That is a low bar. Our fuller looks at Big Cartel for food vendors and Etsy alternatives for home bakers cover each side, and our full breakdown of Etsy's fees works every charge through on a real order.
Both are built for shipping a package to a stranger, so both leave the same gaps if you sell locally.
That last one deserves emphasis on a shipping-first comparison. Many states prohibit shipping cottage food entirely, or allow sales only within the state, and most exclude anything requiring refrigeration. Both platforms will happily let you list something your state does not permit you to ship, and the liability is yours.
Labeling is your responsibility too. NIST's guidance on packaging and labeling covers the net-quantity and identity requirements that apply to packaged goods, and your state's cottage food rules layer on top of that with their own required statements.
If most of your orders are collected rather than mailed, both of these are the wrong shape. 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, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. It does not ship nationally, print labels, or sell digital products, so it is not a replacement for either of these if shipping is your business. You can test it in a week if you are not sure which describes you.
E-commerce keeps taking share of US retail, which the Census Bureau tracks in its quarterly retail e-commerce sales report. That matters here in a specific way: as more buying moves online, marketplace search becomes more competitive and more expensive to win, while a direct link to customers you already have becomes proportionally more valuable.
Neither trend argues for abandoning a marketplace that works. Both argue for not having your only channel be one you do not control.
Etsy fees have only moved in one direction: the transaction fee went from 5% to 6.5% in 2022, and Offsite Ads became mandatory above $10,000. Price the platform you would be on in two years, not the one on the page today.
For a US seller: $0.20 to list, 6.5% of the item price including shipping and gift wrapping, and 3% plus $0.25 in Etsy Payments processing. On a $25 order that is about $2.83, or 11.3%. Offsite Ads adds 15%, or 12% for shops over $10,000 in trailing sales, on attributed orders only.
Platinum is $15 a month after a 7-day free trial, and Diamond is $30. Annual billing is offered. Big Cartel takes no commission on sales, and card processing is set by the payment provider you connect rather than by Big Cartel.
At roughly eight orders a month on a $25 average. Below that, Etsy's pay-per-sale model wins because there is no fixed cost. At 40 orders a month, Big Cartel is about $684 a year cheaper.
Its pricing page lists a feature called Sales tax autopilot on its paid plans. What it does not specify there is whether that covers filing and remitting returns or only calculating rates at checkout, which are different jobs. Ask their support before treating tax as solved.
It will process the order. Whether you may sell it is decided by your state's cottage food law, not by the platform. Pay particular attention to shipping restrictions and refrigeration exclusions before listing anything.
Usually not, at least not immediately. Etsy's search traffic is an asset you built. The more common approach is to keep Etsy for discovery, send your own audience to your own link, and compare the two order counts each month before deciding anything.
Both are built for it. Big Cartel includes unlimited shipping label printing at discounted rates, which is genuinely useful. Etsy has label purchasing too, plus the buyers. On mechanics they are close; on traffic they are not.
The fee math is not close. Past about eight orders a month, Etsy costs roughly $684 a year more than Big Cartel on the same sales, and that gap grows with every order you make.
The traffic math is much closer, and it is the one that should decide it. If Etsy search genuinely brings you strangers, 11.3% is a fair price for customer acquisition. If you are sending your own followers to Etsy and paying that cut on people who already knew your name, you are funding a marketplace to process a sale you made yourself.
The test costs $15 and one month: open the storefront, point your own audience at it, and see whether your Etsy orders drop. If they do not, Etsy was earning its cut. If they do, you have your answer and the switch has already paid for itself.
