The short version: GrownBy is free to start and is owned by the farmers who use it. It is run by Farm Generations Cooperative, every farm that starts selling can become a member-owner, and its shopper site states that at least 98% of a purchase goes back to the farm, which puts its own take at no more than 2%. It also accepts SNAP/EBT, which almost nothing else in this category does. Barn2Door is a conventional software company: $119 a month billed annually plus a one-time $399 setup fee at its entry tier, rising to $299 plus $599, with card processing fixed at 2.9% plus $0.30 and no free trial. On a $24,000 farm, Barn2Door's first year is about $2,667. GrownBy's is close to the processing alone.
GrownBy's figures came from its own shopper site and farmer site in July 2026; it does not publish a rate card. Barn2Door's came off its published pricing page.
They are two answers to the same question, from opposite directions.
GrownBy is a cooperative. It describes itself as the only cooperatively-owned app for farm sales in the world, built, owned, and designed by working farmers. Farms that sell on it can become member-owners. That is not a marketing frame, it is a legal structure, and it changes who the software ultimately answers to.
Barn2Door is a software company selling a service. Its subscription buys the platform, its setup fee buys onboarding, and its higher tiers buy named people: a one-to-one onboarding manager at Business, an account manager at Scale. It states plainly that it is not the cheap, generic DIY commerce solution.
Which produces genuinely different products:
The pricing transparency gap runs the comparison: one publishes everything, the other almost nothing. Our Barn2Door alternative guide for small farms covers where both sit against the rest of the field.
Same four disclosures on both. Where a figure is not published, this says so.
| GrownBy | Barn2Door Entrepreneur | Barn2Door Business | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | Free to start. No rate card published | $119/mo billed annually | $159/mo billed annually |
| Free trial | Free to begin with, so no trial construct | None advertised, signup runs through a demo | None advertised |
| Platform fee | Not published as a rate. The shopper site states at least 98% of a purchase goes back to the farm, implying a take of no more than 2% | $0 commission, but a one-time $399 setup fee | $0 commission, $499 setup fee |
| Card processing | Not published | 2.9% + $0.30, fixed at every tier | 2.9% + $0.30, fixed |
Barn2Door Scale is $299 a month plus a $599 setup fee. Its add-ons are priced separately: a POS device at $59 one-time, a Marketing Toolkit at $39 a month, Academy classes at $99 each, and a custom farm logo at $499.
GrownBy's "at least 98%" is the closest thing it publishes to a rate, and it is worth treating as a ceiling rather than a quote. Ask for the exact figure and whether payment processing sits inside or outside that 2% before you rely on it.
Take a farm doing $2,000 a month across 40 orders, a $50 average order and $24,000 a year.
Barn2Door Entrepreneur, billed annually
GrownBy, using the published 98% figure
Even at the pessimistic end, GrownBy comes in well under half of Barn2Door's first year. At the optimistic end it is under a fifth.
That gap is large enough that the interesting question is not which is cheaper. It is what Barn2Door's $2,667 buys that a free co-op does not provide, and the answer is real.
Reading its full feature table rather than the plan cards, the Entrepreneur tier includes:
Move up a tier and you add a Simple Tax Tool, routing integration, multiple price sheets, and a named onboarding manager. Scale adds delivery-as-a-service, advanced tax integrations, chat support, and an account manager.
That is a substantial system, and the merchant-account layer in particular is a genuine risk transfer: fraud monitoring on every attempted purchase and Barn2Door handling buyer disputes on your behalf are things you do not notice until the week you badly need them.
The fair way to weigh that against a free co-op is to ask what happens on the bad day rather than the ordinary one. A chargeback you lose because nobody responded in time can cost more than a month of subscription, and a farm owner who has never heard the word representment will lose it. A platform that handles disputes on your behalf is buying you out of a problem you may never have, which is exactly what insurance is and exactly why it is hard to value in advance. Ask GrownBy directly who handles disputes on its side before treating the two as equivalent on that point.
GrownBy's openness about its structure sits alongside real opacity about its pricing, and both things are true at once.
None of those are hostile questions and a co-op should answer them happily. The point is that free-to-start removes the cost of testing, not the need to understand what you are joining. You can run the same evaluation against a storefront that publishes every number at the same time, which gives you a baseline to compare any answer against.
Three things, and two of them are unusual enough to decide the question on their own.
SNAP/EBT acceptance. Farmers can apply to accept SNAP and EBT benefits on GrownBy, and GrownBy cites River Queen Greens as the first US farm to do so. If serving lower-income members is part of what your farm is for, this is close to decisive, because almost nothing else in this category supports it. USDA's SNAP retailer guidance covers the authorization side, and its list of stores accepting SNAP online shows how narrow the online-acceptance field still is.
Member-ownership. Every farm that starts selling has the opportunity to become a member-owner of the cooperative. That means a say in the roadmap and a structural guarantee that the platform's incentives stay pointed at farms rather than at investors. Whether that matters to you is a values question as much as a business one, and it is a legitimate reason to choose a tool.
A shopper-facing marketplace. Buyers have a single account across farms on grownby.com, which means there is at least some chance of a customer finding you rather than only arriving from your own link. Barn2Door has no equivalent.
Our fuller look at GrownBy for small farm vendors covers the product in more detail.
GrownBy's weaknesses:
Barn2Door's weaknesses:
Our Barn2Door pricing breakdown covers who grows into it.
The SNAP line is bigger than it looks. If EBT customers are part of your market, GrownBy accepting SNAP is a capability difference no Barn2Door tier closes at any price.
Both scale down differently, and it is worth being blunt.
GrownBy scales down well. Free to start means a farm doing $500 a month can be on it without the software being a meaningful cost. Very few things in this category are true of.
Barn2Door does not. At $2,667 in year one, a farm needs real volume before that is proportionate, which its own tier names acknowledge: Entrepreneur is described as being for part-time and hobby farmers, and it is still $2,667.
The Census Bureau's business and economy data is a reminder of how small most food businesses actually are. Software priced at 11% of revenue is a decision that has to be earned by what it removes from your week, not assumed because a platform is well regarded.
If you sell fixed-price products for pickup rather than running a CSA or selling by weight, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, plus sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states, local delivery with a radius and a route, and pickup at several locations. It does not sell by weight, does not do subscriptions, and does not accept SNAP/EBT, so it is not a substitute for either platform here if any of those are central. You can test it in a week to find out which camp you are in. Our comparison of e-commerce platforms for farmers covers the wider field, and our Homegrown against Barn2Door piece works that specific trade in detail.
It is free to start, and it does not publish a rate card. Its shopper site states that at least 98% of a purchase goes back to the farm, which implies its own take is no more than 2%. Ask directly what that 2% covers and whether payment processing sits inside or outside it.
Entrepreneur is $119 a month billed annually plus a one-time $399 setup fee. Business is $159 plus $499 and Scale is $299 plus $599. Card processing is a fixed 2.9% plus $0.30 at every tier, and no free trial is advertised.
GrownBy, substantially. On a $24,000 farm, Barn2Door's first year is about $2,667 against GrownBy's estimated $480 to $1,300 depending on how processing is handled. Even the pessimistic GrownBy figure is under half.
On GrownBy, yes: farmers can apply to accept SNAP/EBT benefits, and it cites the first US farm to do so through the platform. Barn2Door does not advertise SNAP or EBT acceptance. If that matters to your program, it is the single largest difference here.
GrownBy is run by Farm Generations Cooperative, and every farm that starts selling has the opportunity to become a member-owner. In practice that means a say in what gets built and a structure whose incentives are pointed at farms rather than at outside investors.
It supports CSAs and online farm stores and has a market cash register app, but it does not publish a feature matrix the way Barn2Door does. Confirm weight-based pricing and subscription specifics directly before assuming parity, because Barn2Door documents both explicitly at its entry tier.
It is selling onboarding as part of the product, and the higher tiers include named onboarding and account managers. The fee reflects real work by real people. It is also non-recurring and paid up front, so ask what happens to it if you cancel in month two.
This is not really a price comparison, even though the price gap is enormous. It is a comparison between a farmer-owned cooperative that is free to start and a commercial platform charging $2,667 in year one for a documented, well-supported system.
If you want to accept SNAP/EBT, or ownership structure matters to you, GrownBy answers a question Barn2Door does not, and you should start there and ask the pricing questions it does not publish. If you need sell-by-weight, subscriptions, POS, and onboarding documented in advance, Barn2Door gives you all of that with every number on the page, and at higher volume its cost stops being the point.
What nobody should do is pay $2,667 for a farm platform without first spending nothing to try the free one, since one of these two lets you do exactly that.
