KneadIt

Every state in America has cottage food laws that allow people to bake from home and sell directly to consumers. It's a booming industry, but the tools available are either built for full-scale restaurants or barely a step above a Google Form.

KneadIt was born from watching my wife run her home bakery. She's talented at what she does, but the business side was chaos — orders tracked in spreadsheets, payments chased through text messages, and tax season spent digging through receipts. I knew I could build something better.

KneadIt is a multi-tenant SaaS platform built specifically for cottage food bakers. Each baker gets their own branded storefront on a custom subdomain, a full admin panel to manage their business, and tools designed around how home bakers actually work, made-to-order products, local delivery, seasonal menus, and capacity limits.

Key Features:

• Online storefront with customizable themes and branding
• Order management with status tracking and email notifications
• PayPal invoicing with automated payment reminders
• Customer directory with order history and notes
• Expense and income tracking with IRS-friendly categories
• Recipe cost calculator and price suggestion tool
• Delivery planning and route optimization
• Coupon and discount codes
• Review collection and analytics
• Weekly prep planner and order calendar
• Holiday planning with lead time warnings
• Configurable dashboard with toggleable widgets

Three subscription tiers: Starter, Growth, and Pro — each unlocking additional features as a baker's business grows. Every plan includes a 30-day free trial.

Tech Stack:

• Laravel 12 with Filament 5 admin panel
• Stancl Tenancy for multi-tenant architecture (database-per-tenant)
• Stripe billing via Laravel Cashier
• PayPal Invoicing API for baker-to-customer payments
• Tailwind CSS with four storefront themes
• Alpine.js for interactive components

Architecture:

The central application handles registration, onboarding, subscription billing, and a platform admin panel for monitoring all bakeries. Each tenant gets an isolated database with their own products, orders, customers, and settings. The storefront is fully dynamic — every piece of copy is configurable from the admin, and bakers who already have their own website can skip the storefront entirely and use KneadIt purely as a backend tool.