Your numbers
Fill in what you know and press Calculate. The figures shown are a worked example, not a benchmark — replace them with your own.
What this job costs
| Cost component | Whole job | Per piece | Share |
|---|
The same job at every quantity tier
Setup does not change with quantity, so the whole curve below is the setup being spread thinner. This is the table to look at before quoting a short run off a long run's price.
| Quantity | Setup per piece | Cost per piece | Break-even | At target margin |
|---|
What to look at
What this does and doesn't do
This is arithmetic on numbers you supply: it totals what one job costs you and compares that to what the job earns. It does not know your blank supplier's price, your press's real throughput, your local wage rules, or what a customer in your town will pay — every one of those is an input you read off your own invoices, payroll and equipment. Treat the output as the cost floor underneath your own pricing decision, not a recommended price, and not a market rate.
Pricing a custom-made physical object where a one-off setup and machine time dominate a short run is not only an apparel problem. If you also quote printed parts, the 3D print price calculator does the same job for print time, filament or resin, failure rate and post-processing. Already running your shop through Printavo or a similar platform? See how this calculator differs — it costs a job before that number ever reaches a quoting system. Pricing jobs off a spreadsheet instead? See what a flat per-piece rate leaves out — setup spread over the wrong quantity, blanks bought without a spoilage margin, and embroidery machine time divided by heads when hooping should not be.
Common questions
How much should I charge for screen printing?
There is no single right number, because the cost side moves far more than the price side: the same design is a different job at 12 pieces than at 288, and a shop paying $3.10 for a blank has a different floor than one paying $6.40. Work out your own cost per piece first — screens, art, press time, ink, blanks with a spoilage allowance, and a share of overhead — then set the price above it by the margin you need. This calculator does that arithmetic on your own numbers; what your market will bear is a separate question it cannot answer.
Why does a 12-shirt order cost so much more per shirt than a 144-shirt order?
Because setup is per job, not per shirt. Burning, registering and reclaiming a screen costs the same whether you print a dozen or a gross, and a three-colour front plus a one-colour back is four screens either way. Spread over 12 pieces that setup can be several dollars a shirt; over 144 it rounds to cents. Quoting both off the same price list is the most common way a small run loses money, which is why the break table on this page costs the same job at every standard quantity tier.
Should I charge screen setup and digitising as a separate line?
Either works, and the calculator shows the consequence of each. Billing setup separately keeps the per-piece price honest and comparable, and it matters most on repeats: a second run of the same design owes no new digitising and no new art, so a shop that buried those in the per-piece price has to explain why the repeat is cheaper. Absorbing setup instead is fine as long as you know it is in there — enter what you actually bill as a setup fee and the break-even figure adjusts to only the setup the per-piece price still has to carry.
How do I price embroidery — per 1,000 stitches or per piece?
Per 1,000 stitches is the industry's shorthand for the machine time, and it is a reasonable proxy because run time really is proportional to stitch count. It hides two things this calculator makes visible. A multi-head machine sews several pieces in one cycle, so the machine minutes per piece are the cycle divided by the number of heads — while hooping is per piece per placement and is not divided by anything, which is usually what actually caps a shop's daily output. And digitising is a one-off for the design rather than a per-piece cost, so on a short run it is a far bigger share of the job than a stitch-count rate suggests.
Does anything I type here get uploaded?
No. Every calculation runs in this browser, and nothing you enter is sent anywhere — there are no accounts, no cookies, and no analytics vendor. If you use the save button, your numbers are written to this browser's own local storage on this device only, and the forget button deletes them. Anonymous feature counts (estimate, example_loaded, inputs_saved) are stored the same local way and can be switched off.