The four a.m. shift runs in the family.

Butterbase started with my siblings. They're the bakers — up before dawn, recipes in a smudged notebook, loading the car for the Saturday market and sometimes loading half of it back home again. Me? I've been a software engineer for fifteen-plus years. The only four a.m. shift I ever worked was at a Starbucks.

But I've watched the grind up close: prices that were a best guess, spreadsheets that never survived a flour-dusted Saturday, good bakes with no idea whether they made money. That's a problem software is actually good at. So I built the tool I wanted my family to have — fast enough for one hand at the bench, honest enough to say what every bake really costs, and able to take a card at the market without a second device.

Bakers should spend their time baking — not reconciling.