The short version: Yes, genuinely. Cottage CMS has a Free Forever plan at $0 with no credit card to start, and it is more substantial than most free tiers in this category: Square-powered checkout, pre-orders and weekly schedules, a public storefront, a product catalog with options and order forms, and customer records connected to orders. What it leaves out is a custom domain, delivery and shipping options, QR codes, text messaging, business email, blog posts, and digital products, all of which sit on Pro at $200 a year, or $16.67 a month billed annually. A Scale tier at $370 a year arrives in August 2026, and Cottage CMS is currently telling users that full-feature access is moving up to it and to start Pro before launch to keep today's feature set.
All figures came off Cottage CMS's own pricing cards in July 2026. Note their `/pricing` link is broken; the cards render on the homepage.
Yes, and it is worth saying clearly because "free" often means "free trial" or "free until you do anything useful."
Cottage CMS's Free plan is described as Free Forever, priced at $0/forever, with no credit card to start. It is not a countdown. It is a tier you can stay on indefinitely, and the company describes it as a complete starter storefront you can stay on as long as you need.
What you get on Free:
That is a working shop. Pre-orders and scheduling on a free tier is unusual, and it is the feature most cottage food sellers actually need. Credit where it is due.
What follows is what the free plan includes, what sits behind Pro, and the arithmetic of "free plus Square" against a paid flat fee. If you would rather test than read, the other side of that comparison has a 7-day trial.
The paid tier, Pro at $200 a year, adds the following. If you need any of these, Free is not enough.
| Feature | Free | Pro ($200/yr) | Scale ($370/yr, Aug 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Storefront, catalog, order forms | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pre-orders (Drops) and weekly schedules | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Square-powered checkout | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Custom domain | No | Yes | Yes |
| Delivery and shipping options | No | Yes | Yes |
| QR codes and text messaging | No | Yes | Yes |
| Business email, blog posts, custom pages | No | Yes | Yes |
| Digital products | No | Yes | Yes |
| Unlimited locations, nationwide shipping, custom CSS | No | No | Yes |
The two that matter most for a working cottage food business are delivery options and a custom domain. If you drive orders to customers, or if you want your shop at yourbakery.com rather than on a subdomain, you are on Pro from the start and the free plan is a preview rather than a destination.
$200 a year, listed against a $240 regular price, which works out to $16.67 a month billed annually. Cottage CMS frames the discount as two months on us. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee and you can cancel at any time.
Monthly billing is not offered on the published cards, so the $200 is an annual commitment softened by the refund window.
For context against the rest of the category on an annual basis:
Pro sits in the middle of that range. Nothing about it is expensive for what it includes.
This is the number the pricing cards do not restate, and it matters more than the subscription.
Cottage CMS uses Square-powered checkout, which means your card processing rate is Square's, not Cottage CMS's. Square's published online rate is 3.3% plus 30 cents on its free plan and 2.9% plus 30 cents on its paid plans, so what you pay depends on which Square plan your account sits on.
Two practical consequences:
Neither of those is a criticism. It is simply that "free" describes the software, and every platform that accepts cards has a processing cost underneath it.
It is worth doing that arithmetic once so the word "free" does not do more work than it should. A seller doing $1,500 a month through a free Cottage CMS storefront on Square's free plan pays $0 in software and roughly $49.50 plus 30 cents an order in processing, so about $64 a month, or $768 a year, to take those payments. That is not Cottage CMS's fee and they are not hiding it. But it is the actual cost of running a free shop, and it is larger than several paid subscriptions in this category. The useful question is never whether the software is free. It is what the whole stack costs and what each piece of it removes from your week.
Pro is billed annually, so the decision deserves ten minutes rather than a click.
Point five is the one that quietly costs the most hours. Sales tax is administered state by state, and USAGov's small business guidance is a reasonable starting point for the registration and filing obligations that no storefront removes unless it explicitly says it does. The IRS's guidance on recordkeeping for small businesses covers what you should be keeping either way, and keeping processing fees itemized is what lets you rerun the comparison above with your own numbers next year. Our roundup of the best online ordering systems for small food vendors sets these options side by side with the same disclosure standard.
This is the most important thing on their pricing page right now and it is easy to miss.
Cottage CMS is launching a Scale tier at $370 a year, or $30.83 a month billed annually, in August 2026. Alongside it, the page states plainly that full-feature access is moving up, and encourages sellers to start Pro before launch to keep today's full feature set while their membership stays active.
Read carefully, that means:
Scale itself adds $10 a month in text messaging credits, unlimited locations, nationwide shipping, domain-branded email, and custom CSS.
If you are evaluating Cottage CMS in mid-2026, this is the single fact most likely to change your decision, and it will be stale by the autumn. Check their current pricing before acting on anything written here.
A note on how to read a message like that, because it is a common pattern and it is not automatically a warning sign. Repricing upward as a product matures is normal, and offering existing members the old feature set is more generous than simply changing the terms. The thing worth being deliberate about is the condition attached: keeping today's access while your membership stays active means a lapse could reset you onto the new structure. If you buy Pro on that basis, treat the renewal date as something to protect rather than something that will look after itself, and confirm in writing what happens if a card fails and the membership lapses for a week.
Free is genuinely the right answer for a real group of sellers.
For that seller, Cottage CMS Free is one of the better offers in this category and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise.
The free plan stops being enough at fairly predictable moments:
At that point the question stops being "is it free" and becomes "is $200 a year the right price for what I need," which is a much easier question to answer.
The signal to watch is not revenue but friction: the week you catch yourself working around a missing feature instead of using one, the free tier has started charging you in time.
If you have already concluded you need to pay for something, the comparison broadens.
At $200 a year, Cottage CMS Pro is $80 a year more than a $10 a month storefront and $148 less than Squarespace Core or Shopify Basic. What differs is what you get rather than the price:
The honest framing is that these are two well-built products for the same buyer that made different bets about which chores to remove. Our full comparison of Homegrown against Cottage CMS works through both sides, and Cottage CMS alternatives covers the field around it.
If you want to see which set of chores matters more in your week, you can run a real week of orders on a pickup-first storefront while your Cottage CMS free plan stays exactly where it is, which costs you nothing on either side.
Yes. The Free plan is priced at $0/forever with no credit card to start, and Cottage CMS describes it as a complete starter storefront you can stay on as long as you need. It includes Square checkout, pre-orders and weekly schedules, a public storefront, a product catalog, order forms, and customer records.
$200 a year, listed against a $240 regular price, which is $16.67 a month billed annually. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee and you can cancel anytime. Monthly billing is not offered on the published cards.
A custom domain, delivery options, shipping options, QR codes, text messaging, business email, blog posts, custom pages, and digital products. Delivery and the custom domain are the two most vendors hit first.
No platform fee is stated on the pricing cards. Checkout is Square-powered, so your card processing rate is Square's, which is 3.3% plus 30 cents on Square's free plan and 2.9% plus 30 cents on its paid plans. Confirm which applies before budgeting.
A new tier at $370 a year, or $30.83 a month billed annually, launching August 2026. It adds $10 a month in text credits, unlimited locations, nationwide shipping, domain-branded email, and custom CSS.
Cottage CMS's own page says full-feature access is moving up and encourages starting Pro before launch to keep today's feature set while your membership stays active. If you were going to buy Pro anyway, that timing is worth taking seriously. Confirm the grandfathering terms with them directly before paying.
It does not advertise sales tax filing. Square provides tax calculation tools, but registering, filing, and remitting returns are separate work that stays with you unless a platform explicitly does it.
Cottage CMS Free is a real free plan, not a trial, and it includes pre-orders and scheduling that several paid products charge for. If you sell for pickup, do not need a custom domain, and are testing whether online ordering works for you, stay on it and spend nothing.
You outgrow it the moment you deliver, want your own domain, or want to text your customers, and at that point Pro at $200 a year is fairly priced for what it adds. The thing to be aware of right now is the August 2026 Scale launch and Cottage CMS's own statement that full access is moving up, because that changes what Pro means depending on when you buy it. Check their live pricing before deciding, and if the chores you most want gone are sales tax and delivery routing rather than drops and text messaging, it is worth comparing against a pickup-first storefront before you commit to a year.
