What should a bouquet-subscription share actually cost? Enter your share count, season length, bouquet size and costs below — get a per-share weekly price, the full-season subscription price, and your real margin. Built so the numbers pencil out, not just feel right.
Flower CSA pricing · built free at getstemwise.com
Sensible starting numbers for a small farm — change anything to match yours.
Per share, per week, at your target margin.
Want this pricing in your inbox? We’ll email you the costs, the share price and the season figures above — the numbers you’ll want in front of you when you set your price. The full costing method comes with it.
Same costs, three margin targets — so you can see the trade between affordable and profitable.
| Margin | Per week | Full season | Season profit |
|---|
A flower CSA usually prices for a 45–60% margin — high enough to absorb a bad bloom week, low enough that members renew.
Pricing assumes the bouquets exist. This checks that. Your shares need 667 stems cut every week ( shares × 20 stems, plus the 10% you cut and can’t use) for 16 weeks. Put your own bloom windows in below — first and last week each crop actually cuts, and roughly what it gives you per week. These are example rows, not advice — the weeks and yields have to be yours.
| Crop | Role | First wk | Last wk | Stems/wk | Window |
|---|
A bouquet is not a pile of stems. Say what one share is made of, and give each crop above its role. A week can beat the stem count and still build no complete bouquet.
Pricing is step one. Stemwise turns your CSA into a weekly plan: it counts the stems your shares need, checks them against what's blooming, and tells you the surplus to fill bouquets from — and the shortfall to buy in. That's the part the spreadsheet can't do.
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Become a founding grower →A flower CSA — community-supported agriculture for bouquets — is one of the best cash-flow tools a small flower farm has: members pay up front, you get working capital in spring, and you have guaranteed homes for your blooms all season. But most growers price it by gut feel, and gut feel almost always runs too low. This calculator works the way a profitable farm actually prices: from the cost of a single bouquet up.
Start with your stems per bouquet and cost per stem (not the wholesale price — your real cost to grow and cut it), add packaging and the labor to build and pack each share, then apply the margin you need to stay in business. The result is a defensible per-share price and a full-season subscription number you can put on a sign-up page today.
| Input | Typical small-farm range |
|---|---|
| Stems per bouquet | 15–25 |
| Cost per stem (grown) | $0.25–$0.50 |
| Stems cut but not sellable | 5–20% |
| Packaging per share | $0.40–$1.00 |
| Build + handling time | 4–8 min/share |
| Target margin | 45–60% |
It's tempting to plug in the wholesale price you'd pay for a stem. Don't — that's a buy-in price, not a grow cost. Your real cost per stem is seed and plugs, amendments and drip, and a fair share of your own time spent sowing, pinching, netting, and harvesting, divided across the stems a bed actually yields. Most growers land between $0.25 and $0.50 per stem once labor is counted honestly. If you skip your labor here, your CSA will look profitable on paper and exhaust you in real life.
Not every stem you cut is bouquet-grade. Some come up short, some bend, some open too far in a hot week, some get eaten. Those stems cost exactly the same to grow as the ones that go in a share — the seed, the bed space, the water and the harvest time were all spent — but they earn nothing. So the flowers in a 20-stem share do not cost 20 stems. At a 10% cull rate they cost 22.2, because that is how many you had to cut to end up with twenty you'd hand to a member.
This is the input a pricing model most often leaves out, and leaving it out always moves the answer the same way: up. A cost you don't model is a cost you appear not to have. On the default figures it is the difference between a $19.20 share and a $20.76 one — and a farm that prices at $19.20 while binning one stem in ten isn't earning the 50% margin it set, it's earning about 43%. The calculator shows the binned stems on their own line rather than quietly folding them into the flower cost, because the size of that line is the point.
It changes the growing plan too, not just the price. Thirty shares of twenty stems is 600 stems in bouquets, but 667 stems cut. The coverage check below plans for the 667, so the tool can never charge you for a cull rate it doesn't also ask you to grow. If you'd rather see the numbers with every stem selling, set the rate to 0 — but set it deliberately, and know that's what you've done.
Both. Quote the per-week price so members can compare it to a grocery-store bouquet (you'll win — yours is fresher and local), and sell the full-season share as one up-front payment so you get the cash when you need it most: spring, when you're buying seed and soil. A half-share (every other week) at a slightly higher per-bouquet price is the easiest way to widen your audience without dropping your margin.
Pricing is the easy half. The hard half is the one that actually sinks a CSA: will your field have 30 bouquets' worth of flowers every week, for 16 weeks? The season coverage check above answers it. Enter the first and last week each crop cuts and roughly what it gives you per week, and it lays your bloom windows against the stems your shares are owed, week by week, and names the weeks that come up short.
The trap it exists to catch is the season total. Add every crop's whole-season yield together and it will usually clear what your members are owed with room to spare — the example rows above project 12,645 stems against the 10,672 the shares need cut. Yet four of those sixteen weeks are short, because the spare is in September and the gap is in June. A surplus in one week does not fill a bouquet in another, so the check reports the shortfall and the spare as two independent numbers and never nets them into one.
Stems are not bouquets, so the check counts both. A week can beat the stem count and still build nothing: 850 stems that are all sweet peas and snapdragons make no complete share if your recipe asks for filler. So the second half of the check takes the recipe you describe — how many focal, secondary, filler and greenery stems go into one share — gives each crop a role, and limits every week by its scarcest role rather than its total. In the example rows above, four weeks have enough stems to cover every share and cannot build them: weeks five through seven leave 783, 621 and 621 sellable stems against the 600 the bouquets need, and produce zero complete bouquets, because nothing in the field is filler until celosia starts in week eight. That is the same never-net rule one level down — a glut of secondary does not stand in for the focal it isn't.
Two things it still leaves to you. It plans the CSA on its own, so if the same beds also owe a wedding or a market table that week, put all of it side by side in the free weekly stem reconciliation calculator. And it takes your bloom windows on trust, because only your own records know when your beds actually start cutting — no calculator can tell you when your dahlias break, and one that claimed to would be guessing. Running all of it every week, from real harvest projections rather than typed-in windows, is what Stemwise itself does. Read the full pricing method here.
What this pricing model does not include. Sales tax and card fees, delivery or pick-up-site costs, and any capital you're paying off — a cooler, a tunnel, a van. Labour is two figures only: the build-and-pack time per share, plus whatever growing and harvest time you folded into your cost per stem, so if you raise the share count you have to raise those with it. Shares that go unsold, or a member who drops mid-season, are not modelled either — the season figures assume every share you enter is sold and paid for. Everything named here would move the profit down, not up.
For a full market-size bouquet (18–25 stems), most farms land between $25 and $40 per week once a 45–60% margin is applied. Smaller "petite" shares run $18–$28. Use the calculator above with your real costs to find your number.
Most run 8–18 weeks, matched to your reliable bloom window — often early summer through first frost. A shorter, fuller season beats a long one with thin shoulder weeks.
Yes — the up-front payment is the main reason to run a CSA. It funds your spring inputs. Offer a small early-bird discount (5–10%) to drive sign-ups before you've spent on seed.
45–60%. Below that, one hailstorm or pest week erases your profit; above it, you risk pricing out the neighbors who are your most loyal members.
Yes, and most pricing models don't. A bent, short, bug-bitten or over-open stem cost you exactly as much to grow as a perfect one — the seed, the bed space, the water and the harvest labour were all spent — it just earns nothing. Charge the share for every stem you had to cut, not only the ones that reached a member: at a 10% cull rate, a 20-stem bouquet is 22.2 stems of cost. Most small farms lose somewhere between 5% and 20% depending on the crop, the week and the weather, and it is worth tracking for a season rather than guessing. Leaving it out doesn't make the loss go away, it just moves it out of your price and into your margin.
Multiply shares by stems per bouquet to get what you owe every single week — 30 shares at 20 stems is 600 stems a week, not 9,600 once — then divide by the share of stems you can actually sell, because 600 in bouquets means about 667 cut at a 10% cull rate. Then lay each crop's bloom window (its first and last cutting week) against that weekly number and check every week individually. Don't test it with a season total: the season almost always clears while the shoulder weeks — the first three or four, before the summer annuals come on — sit empty. The season coverage check above does this from your own windows.
Because the crops that carry the middle of the season haven't started. Zinnias, dahlias and celosia are late; a CSA that opens before they cut is leaning on sweet peas, snapdragons and whatever overwintered. That's why growers stagger the start date to their real first-cut week rather than the calendar, or buy in for the opening weeks and price it in.
Yes, and it is the most common way a coverage check goes wrong. A bouquet needs a mix — focal blooms, secondary flowers, filler and usually greenery — so a week is limited by its scarcest role, not by its stem total. Six hundred stems that are all zinnias and snapdragons build no complete share if your recipe calls for four filler stems. Check each week against the recipe role by role rather than against one number; the season coverage check above does this once you give each crop a role.
Focal blooms are the ones the eye lands on — dahlias, sunflowers, garden roses, peonies. Secondary flowers give the bouquet its body: zinnias, snapdragons, lisianthus, sweet peas. Filler adds texture and makes it look full — celosia, feverfew, statice, grasses. Greenery is the foliage that frames it, such as eucalyptus, basil or ferns. The line moves with the week: a big zinnia is the focal in a week with no dahlias, which is why you set the role per crop rather than being told it.