The Problem: Most home bakers and cottage food producers (people selling cookies, sourdough, or jams from their kitchen) have a "vibes-based" pricing model. They know a bag of flour costs $5, but they have no idea how much the 425g in their sourdough loaf actually costs after accounting for the starter, the salt, and the electricity.
When you're trying to turn a hobby into a side hustle—or just trying to manage a household budget during a period of high food inflation—"guessing" doesn't work. I found that most people were either using messy, disconnected spreadsheets or expensive enterprise software designed for commercial restaurants.
The Solution: I built CrumbCounts to bridge that gap. It’s a dedicated recipe cost calculator and inventory tracker designed specifically for the "aspiring home chef" and the micro-entrepreneur.
Key Features:
Unit Conversion Engine: Input ingredients in bulk units (lbs/kg) and use them in recipes in smaller units (grams/tsp) without doing the mental math.
Dynamic Costing: If the price of butter at your local store jumps 20%, you update it once in your inventory, and every recipe using that butter updates its cost-per-serving instantly.
Profit Margin Analysis: For cottage bakers, you can set a target margin and the app tells you what you should be charging.
Simple UX: No "enterprise" bloat. Just recipes, ingredients, and costs.
The Tech Stack: The app is built to be fast and responsive. I wanted something that felt lightweight enough to use on a phone while standing in the kitchen but powerful enough to handle complex batch scaling on a desktop. (Optional: Insert your stack here, e.g., Next.js, Tailwind, Supabase).
Why I’m sharing it here: I’ve reached a milestone of 10k+ recipes tracked on the platform, and I’m looking for feedback from the HN community. Specifically:
UI/UX: Is the flow from "adding an ingredient" to "viewing a recipe cost" intuitive enough?
Feature Creep: What’s the one thing a home cook actually needs that I’m missing (e.g., nutritional data vs. simple cost tracking)?
It’s currently 100% free to use. I’d love for you to kick the tires and let me know what you think.
avansledright•1h ago
I’m the creator of CrumbCounts.
The Problem: Most home bakers and cottage food producers (people selling cookies, sourdough, or jams from their kitchen) have a "vibes-based" pricing model. They know a bag of flour costs $5, but they have no idea how much the 425g in their sourdough loaf actually costs after accounting for the starter, the salt, and the electricity.
When you're trying to turn a hobby into a side hustle—or just trying to manage a household budget during a period of high food inflation—"guessing" doesn't work. I found that most people were either using messy, disconnected spreadsheets or expensive enterprise software designed for commercial restaurants.
The Solution: I built CrumbCounts to bridge that gap. It’s a dedicated recipe cost calculator and inventory tracker designed specifically for the "aspiring home chef" and the micro-entrepreneur.
Key Features:
Unit Conversion Engine: Input ingredients in bulk units (lbs/kg) and use them in recipes in smaller units (grams/tsp) without doing the mental math.
Dynamic Costing: If the price of butter at your local store jumps 20%, you update it once in your inventory, and every recipe using that butter updates its cost-per-serving instantly.
Profit Margin Analysis: For cottage bakers, you can set a target margin and the app tells you what you should be charging.
Simple UX: No "enterprise" bloat. Just recipes, ingredients, and costs.
The Tech Stack: The app is built to be fast and responsive. I wanted something that felt lightweight enough to use on a phone while standing in the kitchen but powerful enough to handle complex batch scaling on a desktop. (Optional: Insert your stack here, e.g., Next.js, Tailwind, Supabase).
Why I’m sharing it here: I’ve reached a milestone of 10k+ recipes tracked on the platform, and I’m looking for feedback from the HN community. Specifically:
UI/UX: Is the flow from "adding an ingredient" to "viewing a recipe cost" intuitive enough?
Feature Creep: What’s the one thing a home cook actually needs that I’m missing (e.g., nutritional data vs. simple cost tracking)?
It’s currently 100% free to use. I’d love for you to kick the tires and let me know what you think.
Check it out: https://crumbcounts.com
Looking forward to your comments!