Free Alternatives to MarketMan and Toast for Food Costing in Small UK Kitchens and Food Trucks

If you run a small UK kitchen or food truck and can't justify MarketMan's or Toast's monthly fees, the best free food costing options are Google Sheets (with a recipe-costing template), Stack (free tier), the free version of Spoonfusion, and a well-built spreadsheet of your own. For most operators turning over under £200k a year, a structured spreadsheet does 90% of what paid software does — without the subscription.

Below is a practical breakdown of what actually works, what each option costs you in time, and where the free route breaks down.

Why MarketMan and Toast are overkill for many small operators

MarketMan and Toast are excellent platforms, but they're built for multi-site restaurants with full inventory, EPOS integration, and supplier ordering. For a two-person food truck or a single café kitchen, you're paying for features you'll never touch.

The core job for a small operator is narrower:

• Know the cost per portion of each dish
• Know your gross profit margin at the price you charge
• Scale recipes up for batch prep without re-doing the maths
• Spot which menu items are quietly losing you money

You don't need supplier EDI, multi-location stock counts, or a £69–£200/month commitment to do that. You need accurate recipe costing and a bit of discipline.

Option 1: Google Sheets or Excel (genuinely free, fully yours)

A spreadsheet is the most flexible free option, and for UK pricing it's often the most accurate because you control every figure.

Build it with these columns per recipe:

Sum the line costs to get your plate cost. Then add a simple formula for gross profit:

GP% = (Selling price (ex-VAT) − plate cost) ÷ Selling price (ex-VAT) × 100

UK-specific tips that matter:

• Always cost and price excluding VAT. Food sold hot or to eat in is standard-rated at 20%, so a £9 menu price is really £7.50 of revenue. Costing against the £9 gives you a flattering, wrong margin.
• Factor in trim and yield loss. A 5kg box of whole carrots doesn't give you 5kg of usable carrot. Build a yield percentage into your cost-per-unit, or you'll undercost everything.
• Use named cells for your supplier prices so a single update flows through every recipe that uses that ingredient.

The downside: spreadsheets break as they grow. Update a supplier price in one tab and you have to trust your formulas carried it everywhere. They also don't handle batch scaling elegantly unless you build that logic yourself.

Option 2: Stack (free tier)

Stack offers recipe and menu costing with a free plan aimed at independents. It handles ingredient libraries and plate costs without the enterprise overhead. The free tier limits the number of recipes and features, but for a tight food-truck menu of 8–15 items, the cap is often workable. It's a reasonable middle ground if you want something more structured than a spreadsheet but won't pay monthly.

Option 3: Spoonfusion / Saucy free versions

Several lightweight recipe-costing tools offer free starter tiers built for small kitchens. They typically let you enter ingredients with pack prices, calculate cost per portion, and set a target GP. They're less powerful on inventory but perfectly adequate for menu engineering. Check the recipe limits before committing — free tiers are usually capped at a handful of recipes, which suits a focused food-truck menu better than a sprawling gastropub one.

Option 4: A free EPOS with basic reporting (Square)

Square's EPOS is free to use (you pay card transaction fees, not a subscription). It won't cost your recipes for you, but its sales reporting tells you what's actually selling. Pair Square's sales data with a costing spreadsheet and you get a poor man's menu-engineering setup: you know your margins from the sheet and your volumes from Square, which together tell you which dishes to promote, reprice, or cut.

What the free route can't do well

Be honest with yourself about the limits before you commit to the DIY path:

1. Live inventory and waste tracking. Free tools rarely link costing to real stock movement. You'll know the theoretical cost of a dish, not how much you actually wasted last week.
2. Supplier price drift. UK ingredient prices move constantly. A spreadsheet is only as accurate as the day you last updated it. Set a recurring monthly hour to refresh pack prices, or your "costed" menu slowly becomes fiction.
3. Batch scaling errors. Scaling a recipe from 4 portions to 60 for a festival weekend is where manual maths goes wrong — and where over-ordering eats your margin.
4. Multi-format units. Buying in kilos, using in grams, costing per portion — unit conversions are a common source of silent error in homemade sheets.

A simple workflow for a food truck

1. Cost every menu item once, properly, in a spreadsheet — including yield loss and ex-VAT pricing.
2. Set a target GP for each item (many UK street-food operators aim for 65–70% on food).
3. Use Square or your EPOS to track which items sell.
4. Re-cost monthly, or whenever a key supplier price jumps.
5. Cut or reprice any dish that's under target and not pulling volume.

Do this consistently and you'll match most of what paid software delivers for an operation your size — for nothing but your time.

When it's worth upgrading

The moment your spreadsheet starts costing you more in errors and admin time than a subscription would, the free route stops being free. That tipping point usually arrives when you're scaling recipes for events, juggling more than a dozen menu items, or losing track of which supplier price is current. At that stage, accurate batch scaling and automatic costing pay for themselves quickly.

Want this done for you? PrepSheet is a working chef's toolkit for exactly this. Price any dish in seconds with the free food cost calculator, or grab a ready-made Excel costing template that does the maths for your whole menu — built by a chef, no sign-up to try.