Now onboarding cooks across California
Cook from your kitchen
You already cook food people ask you for. gogoplates gives it a storefront — your dishes, your prices, your hours. Neighbors order ahead and drive to you. No delivery, no drivers, no one else in your kitchen.
0%
Commission
We take no cut of your food price. Not 12%, not 15% — nothing. Set your prices and the money is yours.
$12.99
A month, once you're selling
Free until your first order. Sell nothing, pay nothing — and it never goes up because you had a good month.
You
Set the terms
Your prices, your menu, the days and hours you cook. Take a week off whenever you want — switch your kitchen off and back on.
What you'll need
Less than people expect. If you're missing something on this list, apply anyway — most of it takes a day or two to sort out and we'll point you at the right office.
A home-kitchen permit
California has two, and which one you can get depends on your county. Cottage Food covers shelf-stable food — baked goods, jams, granola, candy, roasted coffee — and every county in California issues it. MEHKO covers hot prepared meals, but your county has to opt in first, and 17 have so far.
Check your city or ZIP for a straight answer about where you live. Either way you can cook with us — we'll tell you which permit fits rather than let you find out later.
A food handler card
An online course and a short test. Usually about $15 and under two hours, and it's good for three years.
A photo of each dish
One clear photo per dish, taken on your phone in daylight. This is the part that sells the food — a plate with no picture gets ordered far less. Bring them when we sit down and we'll put your menu up together.
What happens after you apply
Start to finish this takes about a week, and most of that is waiting on your permit. The part that involves us is one sitting.
We call you
Within a couple of days. We talk through what you cook, what you’d charge, and which permit fits your setup.
We check your permit
You send us a photo of your home-kitchen permit and we record the number. We do this before your page goes up, not after — no kitchen is listed on gogoplates until we have seen the paperwork.
We build your page together
One sitting, about an hour. Your kitchen name, your story, your dishes, your prices, and the hours you want to cook.
You go live, and only then set up payment
When your page is ready and you want to start taking orders, Stripe — the company that handles the card payments — asks for your bank details on their own secure form. You type them into Stripe, not into anything of ours, and we never see them.
How you get paid
The customer pays by card when they order. The money goes straight to your bank account through Stripe — gogoplates never holds it.
We take no commission. What comes out of an order is the card fee, and you pay it at cost — the same 2.9% + 30¢ any card reader charges. We don't add anything to it and we don't keep a cent of it.
Customers also pay a $1.49 service fee per order. That sits on top of your prices and never touches what you earn.
On a $100.00 order
- Your food total
- $100.00
- gogoplates commission
- −$0.00
- Card fee, at cost
- −$3.24
- You get
- $96.76
Plus $12.99/month once you've made your first sale, or $129.90/year if you'd rather pay once. That's the whole cost of being here — it doesn't grow when your sales do.
When we ask for bank details — and when we don't
Not today. Applying takes four questions and none of them is a bank account. Nobody should hand over banking details to a company they have only just heard of, and we are not going to ask you to.
Bank details come up once, at the end, when your page is built and you have decided you want to go live. Even then you type them into Stripe's secure form — the company that handles the card payments — never into anything of ours. We never see your account number.
And you still pay nothing. The $12.99/month does not start when you connect your bank. It starts after your first paid order. If a month goes by and nobody buys anything, you are charged nothing at all.
Two accounts get mentioned and people mix them up, so plainly: one receives your order money, the other pays the monthly fee. The same bank is fine for both — it is just two separate steps, and both happen at go-live, not now.
Later, at go-live — not now
- Open the link we send you and choose “US bank account”.
- Sign in to your bank in the window Stripe opens. It takes about a minute and connects instantly.
- No online banking? Type your routing and account numbers instead. Stripe sends two small test deposits — usually a day or two — and you type those amounts back in to finish.
- Tick the box authorising the monthly payment. Stripe emails you a copy for your records.
The first charge only happens after your first paid order. After that it comes out once a month on the same date and shows as gogoplates on your statement. Cancel whenever you like — tell us and it stops. If a payment fails, your kitchen stays open and we'll reach out; nothing switches off overnight.
Apply to cook
Four questions. If you're anywhere in California we'll call you this week. If you're somewhere else, you'll be first in line when we open there — check your area first if you're not sure.