# Knead

> Order management and capacity planning software for home bakers, caterers, and cottage food businesses.

Knead replaces spreadsheets, Instagram DMs, and scattered tools with one platform purpose-built for food businesses. Take orders through a branded online form, plan your production week with a visual capacity calendar, cost your recipes, send professional invoices, and get paid through Stripe — all in one place.

## Who Knead is for

- Home bakers managing custom cake, cookie, and pastry orders
- Cottage food operators selling from a home kitchen
- Caterers managing event orders and production schedules
- Small bakeries and food businesses doing 5–100+ orders per month

## Core features

- **Order management**: Customers submit structured orders through your branded form (The Board). No more decoding DMs or screenshot threads.
- **Capacity planning**: Visual calendar showing your order load against available hours. Know if you can take another order in 30 seconds.
- **Recipe costing**: Link ingredients to recipes and know your true cost per item. AI-powered recipe import from photos (Snap & Create) or text (Paste & Go).
- **Invoicing & payments**: Branded invoices, deposit requests, and Stripe payment links. Track earnings and payouts in The Jar.
- **Ingredient tracking**: Manage your pantry with costs, stock levels, King Arthur reference weights, and low-stock alerts. Snap a photo of a supplier receipt and Knead captures the vendor, total, and line items into your expenses.
- **Client database**: Customer profiles with order history, allergy tracking, tags, and company associations.
- **Production checklists**: Bake-day checklists generated from confirmed orders (The Pass).
- **Sous Chef (AI assistant)**: A built-in AI assistant that knows your live orders, inquiries, and products. Ask it to draft customer replies, turn an inquiry into an order, set your capacity, or add a product — it does the work and you review and approve.
- **iPhone app**: A native iOS app on the App Store, with push notifications for new orders and inquiries. On Android and everywhere else, Knead runs in the browser and installs to your home screen.

## Pricing

- **Free**: $0 forever — 5 orders/month, invoices and card payments, the Sweet Spot capacity calendar, recipes and true-cost pricing, and full bookkeeping including the Schedule C worksheet
- **Starter**: $19/month or $199/year — unlimited orders, the full morning briefing, customer quote approval with signatures, the Gmail add-on, priority support
- **Growth**: $39/month or $399/year — everything in Starter plus the Sous Chef AI assistant, the full analytics picture, follow-up nudges, and 3 team seats

Knead never takes a commission — card fees go to Stripe, not to Knead. Data export is available on every plan, including Free. Paying yearly is "a baker's dozen": a month on us.

## Links

- Website: https://kneadapp.co
- Sign up: https://app.kneadapp.co/signup
- iPhone app (App Store): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/knead-baker-orders/id6787409065
- Help center: https://help.kneadapp.co
- Help center article index for LLMs: https://help.kneadapp.co/llms.txt
- Help center (full docs for LLMs): https://help.kneadapp.co/llms-full.txt
- Contact: hello@kneadapp.co

## Comparisons

Knead is designed for home bakers and small food businesses. Unlike BakeSmart or Cybake (built for commercial bakeries with retail POS), Knead focuses on custom order workflows — order intake, capacity planning, and client communication. Unlike Castiron (marketplace-focused), Knead is a complete business management platform with recipe costing, production planning, and invoicing built in.