← Screen printing and embroidery price calculator
It sounds like a small ask: “Can you throw the logo on the back too? It’s basically the same design.” It is not the same setup. A second print location is a second full set of screens to burn, register and reclaim — and quoting it at the front-only per-piece price gives that setup away without anyone deciding to.
Open the free screen printing and embroidery price calculatorOn this calculator’s suggested rates — a 3-color design, $18 to burn and register each screen — a front-only job uses 3 screens ($54). Adding an identical 3-color placement on the back is not "one more screen," it is another full set: 6 screens ($108). Including shared art time, total job setup rises from $65.80 to $119.80 — a jump the per-design intuition misses entirely, because the design itself did not change, only how many placements carry it.
On a 24-piece run quoted at $14 a piece either way, adding the back placement without repricing looks harmless — the job still turns a profit — but the numbers move a lot more than "a little extra ink":
| Locations | Break-even / piece | Profit at $14/piece | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Front only | $9.72 | $102.81 | 30.6% |
| Front + back | $12.41 | $38.20 | 11.4% |
Same price, same 24 shirts — but adding the back placement without repricing hands back $64.61 of what was supposed to be profit, and margin falls from a healthy 30.6% to 11.4%, well under a typical 40% target. The shop does not lose money on this job; it just does not know it gave away nearly two-thirds of the intended profit.
Because the extra screens are a one-off cost, spreading them over more pieces shrinks the per-piece hit — but the extra ink and the second press pass are a real cost on every single piece, and that part does not shrink. Net effect: the dollar amount actually at stake on a whole job grows with volume, even as the per-piece gap falls.
| Quantity | Added cost / piece | Added cost, whole job |
|---|---|---|
| 24 | $2.69 | $64.61 |
| 72 | $1.19 | $85.84 |
| 144 | $0.82 | $117.68 |
| 288 | $0.63 | $181.36 |
A shop that eyeballs the per-piece gap as "basically nothing" at high volume is reading the wrong column: the whole-job number is the one that shows up in the bank account, and it keeps climbing the bigger the order gets.
A second print location is a mix, not a single flat number: part of its cost (the extra screens) is fixed per job and shrinks per piece as the order grows, and part of it (ink and press-pass time) is a true per-piece cost that never shrinks. Pricing it as either "add a flat fee" or "add a flat percentage" misses one half of that shape — a percentage undercharges a small run's setup share, and a flat fee undercharges the per-piece run cost on a large one.
Open the screen printing and embroidery price calculator, set your own colors, screen cost, press speed and wage, and change “Print locations” from 1 to 2 to see the setup and break-even move on your own numbers — your rates will not match the defaults above, so the dollar figures will shift even though the shape of the gap (bigger per-piece at low volume, bigger in total at high volume) stays the same. This applies to embroidery and DTF too: switch method to see the same locations toggle move digitizing cost or film area instead of screens.
Yes. A second print location is not one more design on the same setup — it is its own set of screens. On a 3-color job, adding a 3-color back placement takes screen count from 3 to 6, which on this calculator's suggested rates raises total job setup from $65.80 to $119.80 for a 24-piece run. Quoting the second location at the same per-piece price as the first gives that setup away.
No, and that is what makes it easy to under-price. The added cost per piece shrinks as the order grows — $2.69 a piece at 24 pieces, $0.63 a piece at 288 — because the extra screens are a one-off setup spread over more pieces. But the total dollars at stake actually grow with volume, from $64.61 at 24 pieces to $181.36 at 288, because the added ink and press-pass time is a real per-piece cost that scales with the order even as the setup share shrinks.
On the 24-piece worked example, quoting $14 a piece for a two-location job that actually costs $12.41 a piece to break even still turns a profit, but a much thinner one: $38.20 instead of the $102.81 the same price yields on a front-only job, and 11.4% margin instead of 30.6% — well under a typical 40% target. The shop is not losing money, but it is unknowingly giving up almost two-thirds of the profit that price was supposed to deliver.