FlourDesk started with one bakery

She sells the way a lot of home bakers do: a weekly menu, orders taken ahead, pickup from the porch. I'm an engineer by trade. I spend my working life building control and software systems, so when Lizzy needed a real way to run the bakery, take the pre-orders, hold the stock, keep the pickup list straight, I built it for her.

Getting that close to it showed me how the rest of the cottage baking world was handling the same job. Most were stitching it together by hand. A form here, a spreadsheet there, order details buried in DMs, a payment link pasted into a reply, and a fair number of sales lost somewhere in the gaps. The tools they could find were built for restaurants and retail, or they skimmed a cut off every sale, or both. Nothing was built for how cottage baking actually works: a drop goes up, customers reserve, they pay you directly, you bake exactly what sold, they pick it up.

So I built that, and opened it up to every baker who works this way. You keep your own customers and your own payment. We charge a flat monthly price and never take a percentage of what you sell, because your sales are yours. FlourDesk is run by P5 Creative LLC, a small Arizona shop, and it's built by an engineer who would rather make the tool solid than take a slice of your business.