Your plan, archiving, and deleting

Your membership sets how many products and ingredients you can have. Clearing things out interacts with that allowance, and it works differently for products and ingredients: a product is archived and can be brought back, an ingredient is deleted and cannot. This page covers both.

What counts towards your plan

Two things are capped: products and ingredients. Nothing else is — labels, orders, images, and storefront items are unlimited on every plan.

Only what you can actually use counts. An archived product and an ingredient marked inactive do not consume a slot.

Settings → Billing shows what you've used against your plan, and is the authoritative list of what each plan includes.

The plans

These are the standard allowances; your account's actual limits and current usage are shown on Settings → Billing, which is always the authoritative figure.

What happens when you reach the limit

Creating a new product or ingredient is blocked, with a message naming your plan and its limit. Nothing you already have is affected: if your allowance ever drops below what you already hold, everything existing keeps working and stays editable — only new additions are stopped.

Imports are subject to the same limit, so a CSV import can stop part-way through once the cap is reached.

To carry on, either upgrade on Settings → Billing, or free up slots by clearing out what you no longer need.

Archiving a product

Products are never destroyed. Archive hides one rather than deleting it:

• it disappears from your product list, your storefront and any menus it is on,
• it stops counting towards your plan,
• its recipe, costs, and label history are all kept.

To see archived products, use the Include archived toggle on the Products page. Archived products appear dimmed with an Archived badge and a Restore button that puts them back exactly as they were.

A restored product counts towards your plan again, so restoring is worth doing deliberately if you are close to your limit.

Deleting a product for good

Archiving is enough for almost everything — it frees the plan slot, which is the usual reason for clearing a product out. When you genuinely want it gone, tick Delete it permanently instead on the archive dialog, or choose Delete permanently from an archived product's menu. The recipe, the images and every label version with its approval history are destroyed, and there is no Restore.

BakeCheck refuses a permanent delete while anything real still points at the product, and says which of these it is:

• it appears on an order — order lines take their description from the product, so deleting it would leave a blank line in your own sales history,
• it is part of another product's recipe — it would drop out of that recipe, changing its cost and invalidating a label that may already be on a box,
• it is in a box — the box would be left with a missing item.

In every one of those cases the product stays archived, which already hides it and frees the slot.

The record it leaves

A permanent delete is written to Settings → Account history, and that entry is kept for good. It records what was deleted, when, and by whom, and it keeps a copy of every label version the product had — including the wording, who approved it and when.

That entry is the only place a deleted product's label history still exists, so if you are ever asked to account for a declaration that went out on a box, this is where to look. Archiving is reversible and is not recorded here.

Deleting an ingredient

Deleting an ingredient is permanent — there is no Restore for ingredients, because a deleted ingredient would leave the products that used it with a hole in their recipe and their label.

For that reason BakeCheck refuses to delete an ingredient that is used in any product that isn't archived. You will see:

Cannot delete ingredient that is used in products. Mark as inactive instead.

You have two ways forward:

1. Mark it inactive (recommended). Edit the ingredient and untick Active. It stays attached to the products that use it, their costs and labels keep working, it drops out of the pickers when you build new recipes — and it stops counting towards your plan. This is the right move for something you've stopped buying.
2. Remove it from the products first. Take the ingredient off every recipe that uses it, then delete it. Remember that a product you archived no longer blocks the ingredient, so you may only need to clear the live ones.

Tick Show inactive on the Ingredients page to list your inactive ingredients.

Freeing up space, in order

1. Archive products you no longer make — instant, reversible, frees a slot each.
2. Mark ingredients inactive if you've stopped buying them — reversible, frees a slot each, and doesn't disturb existing recipes or labels.
3. Delete ingredients only when nothing uses them and you're sure.

If you have done all of that and your usage still looks wrong, see troubleshooting.

Next: troubleshooting.