Hi everyone!
I'm Julie, and my husband and I have a cake decorating business in Florida. I found this site, and I am already learning a lot!

I had a question about pricing. This has probably been answered a million times, but I'm still learning my way around!

My question was about shaped/3D cakes. I know cake pricing is somewhat regional, so maybe someone from North Florida can answer this one. I am just wondering what is a fair price to charge as a base price for shaped cakes? We have had the hardest time determining this. We feel that it should be more than just a basic layered and tiered cake, because of the extra work involved, but what is a fair price?

I'm not in Florida, but for sculpted cakes, my base pricing starts at $250.00, regardless of the size. Not sure if this helps, but that's how I do it.

Oh ok, thanks, that does help! So you don't really go by servings for sculpted cakes? We haven't been doing a price per serving for ours, but I have seen some cake places say that theirs are $5/serving, $6/serving, etc.

The bakery I worked for in Oklahoma charged flat fees for things like 3-D soccer balls and Barbie cakes. For any other type of sculpted work we charged a minimum of $10 per slice--more depending upon complexity and type of cake and fillings etc. But the work they did was worth it. You have to back up the price with the quality I think.

Yeah, definitely wouldn't want to charge for quality and not deliver!!

Our base price for sculpted cakes (where we actually have to carve cake, not just an unusually shaped pan) is $120. I was worried this was excessive, although some of the bakeries here are more like $200 or more. But it does help to hear what some of you charge! Thanks!

I have a $150 minimum, and I charge by the estimate of time, not serving count. You might try raising it some, then see how it goes. Even if you lose out on 1 out of 5 cakes, you'll still be making the same amount of money but doing less work!

Good point! We will definitely have to think about it. We were pretty much basing ours off of time spent as well, as opposed to servings, since carved cakes can often take more time and work.

We definitely are not trying to undercut other local businesses either, but we are just starting out and wanted our pricing to be fair. Once we have more experience and skill, we will probably raise our prices.

The main reason I was asking this is because we just lost a sale recently. The lady initially was saying that $120 would be fine, but then I guess she thought about it some more and determined that they would just make a cake themselves. THEN she told me her original budget was more like $75. I had asked her what her budget was in the initial consult, but she didn't seem to know at that point. I tried sending her an email back saying that we could work within her budget and maybe do something similar, just not as a carved cake, but never heard back from her. Oh well!

Well, not every customer is your customer, it's not personal. I had someone ask me to decorate a grocery store cake yesterday...definitely not my customer!

Oh wow! Yeah, definitely wouldn't be our customer either!