Free tool
Will every truck be parked before the opening bell?
Enter your vendor count, how many trucks unload at once and the honest minutes each one takes, and see whether your load-in window holds.
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What your stall fee has to cover this season
Put your season costs, your market days and your typical fill on one line and see the daily stall fee that actually breaks even.
A stall fee is not a market rate you copy from the town down the highway. It is the number that carries your liability insurance, your use permit, your scale registrations, your manager hours, the portable restroom and the pumping truck that empties it. Copying someone else's fee copies their cost structure, which you do not have.
Work it in the order below. Add up what the season costs whether or not a single vendor shows, add the per day costs that only happen when you open the gates, subtract sponsorship and grant money that is genuinely committed, then divide by the stall days you actually sell. The gap between the fee at your real fill and the fee at a full lot is the number worth staring at.
Your result
Amount stall fees must carry
$22,680
Everything left after committed sponsorship and grants are applied.
Paid stall days you expect to sell
936
One vendor at one stall on one morning counts as one stall day.
Break-even fee per stall per day
$24.23
Charge less than this at your current fill and the season runs at a loss.
Fee needed if every stall sold
$19.38
The gap between this and the break-even fee is what empty stalls cost your market.
These figures cover costs only, with nothing set aside for reserves, a rained out Saturday or next season's signage.
Why the empty stall number matters most
Managers usually look at the break-even fee and stop. The more useful comparison is between that fee and the one you would need if the lot were full, because the difference is exactly what your unsold stalls cost every grower who did show up. Vendors accept a fee increase far more easily when they can see that recruiting six more farms would hold it down instead.
That framing also changes what you do in the off season. If closing the gap is worth several dollars a stall day, the highest value winter work is not fee policy at all. It is finding the vendors who fill the back row, and building a standby list that can fill a cancellation by Friday night.
What this calculator deliberately leaves out
It excludes reserves, and every market should carry some. A cancelled Saturday, a stolen generator or a wind event that shreds three canopies does not wait for the budget cycle. Many managers add ten to fifteen percent to the break-even fee and hold that difference as a stated contingency line the board can see.
It also excludes percent of sales income and the day of market vendor who pays cash at the gate. If a real share of your revenue comes from those, run the calculator on your committed season vendors only, then treat everything else as the buffer it really is rather than as base income.
Questions about this calculator
Should manager salary go in fixed costs or per day costs?
Put salaried hours in fixed season costs, since you pay them whether or not a Saturday happens. Put hourly market day help, such as gate and token booth staff, in the per day cost. If you are paid per market yourself, that belongs in the per day figure too.
Our fill varies a lot between June and October. What number should I use?
Use the season average of stalls filled, not the peak. If your spread is very wide, run the calculator twice, once for your early and late shoulder weeks and once for high summer, and see whether a two tier fee schedule would be fairer than one flat number.
Can I use this to justify a fee increase to my vendors?
That is exactly what it is for. Bring the four figures, name the biggest cost lines out loud, and show the fee that a full lot would allow. Vendors argue with a number that appears from nowhere and rarely argue with arithmetic they can check themselves.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The market day run sheet, Friday night to lockup
A fill in run sheet that carries a market manager from locking the stall map on Friday evening to reconciling the drawer after the last canopy comes down.
Make that figure hold every Saturday
A break-even stall fee or a load-in window is only worth something if the market actually runs to it week after week. StallDeck keeps the stall map, the fee line and the attendance mark on one record, so your season totals match the number on this page instead of two clipboards. We will show you with your own stall count on a twenty minute call.