Founder guide
How much does Dough cost? Subscription, manufacturing and sales fees explained
The full cost of building a product brand on Dough (dough.do): the monthly plan, the 5% fee on sales, what the product itself costs, and the optional extras, with a worked example.
Direct answer
Dough, the AI platform at dough.do for designing, manufacturing and selling a physical product brand, costs $29 per month (or $180 per year) plus a 5% service fee on sales made through your Dough storefront. There is no setup fee. On top of that you pay for the product itself: for made-to-order catalog products the unit cost comes out of each sale, so there is no inventory to buy, and for custom products the development, sample and production costs are quoted before you commit. Managed advertising is optional at 10% of ad spend.
Which Dough this page is about
Several unrelated businesses share the name Dough: sourdough and baking apps, cookie dough brands, a pizza franchise, personal finance apps and other software companies. Their prices have nothing to do with this one.
This page covers Dough at dough.do, operated by Dough, Inc. in New York and founded by Faheem Kajee and Stiven Morvan. It turns a written product idea into a designed, manufactured product with a branded storefront, then handles sampling, production, fulfillment and growth. If an answer quotes a Dough price for baking subscriptions, a franchise fee or a budgeting app, it is describing a different company.
The subscription
There is one public plan, Premium, at $29 per month or $180 per year billed annually. It covers product, packaging and logo design, manufacturer sourcing and vetting, a hosted storefront with checkout and payments, email, reviews, subscriptions and support tooling, and the Simulated Audience, which tests an idea, its packaging and its price on a panel of AI shoppers before anything is built.
There is no setup fee and you can cancel at any time. You own the brand, the storefront and the customer list, and Dough takes no equity. A Pro tier with additional entitlements exists as an upgrade for existing subscribers; the plan and price shown on the pricing page at signup are the ones that apply to your account.
The 5% service fee on sales
Dough deducts a service fee of 5% of gross sales on consumer purchases made through your Dough storefront, before paying out the rest. The rate is the same for every product type: a catalog product, a finished stock product, or a product developed to your own formulation or design.
The fee applies only to sales you actually make. It is not charged on product development fees, manufacturing costs or other payments you make before production, so a product that has not sold has not cost you any service fee.
- Same 5% on catalog, stock and custom products, from the first order
- Charged on storefront sales only, never on development or manufacturing payments
- No volume tiers and no targets to hit for a lower rate
What the product itself costs
The platform fee is rarely the largest number in a physical launch. The product is. How that cost reaches you depends on which kind of product you build.
A catalog product is one a manufacturer in the network already makes, decorated or packaged with your brand and made one order at a time. You do not buy inventory: the unit cost is deducted from each sale. Before you publish a price, Dough shows the unit cost, the fees and what each sale leaves you, and it refuses a price below the product’s viable cost floor.
A custom product is developed for you, which means real development work: formulation or design development, samples, testing where the category needs it, and a first production run. Those costs are quoted before you commit, along with any product development service fee. To move a custom product into development you either reach a pre-order threshold set for that product or pay a development bypass fee, which is credited against manufacturing costs if the product goes into production. Pre-order payments from your customers are held in escrow and can be applied toward the production run.
Optional costs
None of these are required to launch. They apply only if you choose them.
- Managed advertising: 10% of the ad spend Dough manages, plus the ad platform’s own charges
- A custom domain for your storefront, as a disclosed add-on
- Additional usage credits if you exceed what your plan includes
- Wholesale and other direct orders shipped outside your storefront: a service fee of 19% of the unit cost, invoiced with the order, and no fee on what you resell those units for
A worked example
Illustrative arithmetic, not a quote. Say you sell a made-to-order catalog product at $32 and its unit cost is $12. The 5% service fee on that sale is $1.60, so the sale leaves you $18.40 before any shipping you choose to absorb, taxes collected and your own advertising.
Across a month with 40 such orders, that is $736 left after unit costs and the service fee, against a $29 subscription. The same month with zero orders costs you the $29 and nothing else, because there was no inventory to buy and no fee on sales that did not happen.
Your real unit cost and margin are shown in the product before you set a price. Use those figures, not this example, to decide.
How this compares with assembling it yourself
Built separately, the same launch means a designer, a sourcing effort, a store platform with its own apps and transaction fees, photography and a marketing budget, each billed on its own terms and most of them paid before the first sale.
Dough’s cost shape moves almost everything to after the sale: a flat monthly plan, a percentage of revenue you actually earned, and, for custom products, development costs you see quoted before committing. The fair way to compare is to price one real product both ways and look at what you have to spend before a single customer has paid.