FOR MAKERS SELLING AT CRAFT FAIRS, FARMERS MARKETS & ART FESTIVALS
Materials are already spent on every dollar you take, the card reader takes a slice of it, and the booth fee, jury fee, and drive were all paid before a single sale. This free calculator finds what a market has to sell to break even, what the weekend actually pays you per hour, and the most a booth could cost and still be worth the van. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
A planning figure from the numbers you typed, not an audited statement. It does not add sales tax you collect and remit, income tax, or booth insurance unless you fold those into the other-cost field yourself.
At the sales you entered above, once materials and card fees come out and the fixed cost of getting there is paid.
Everything on this page runs in your browser. Your booth fees, sales, costs, and hours are never uploaded, there is no account, and nothing is saved when you close the tab. Copy shareable link is the one way these figures leave this device, and only because you choose to send them: they ride in the page's URL fragment, which a browser never puts in a request line or a Referer header. Whoever holds that link can read the numbers in it, so send it the way you would send the numbers themselves. We count only anonymous local feature events (event-priced, booth-fee-tested, link_copied) so we can tell whether the calculator gets used — no fees, sales, costs, or hours are recorded, and Do Not Track / Global Privacy Control turn it off automatically.
Because it is still yours. A caterer who over-preps throws food away, but a maker who brings 60 candles and sells 22 drives home with 38 candles and sells them at the next market or online. So the materials that belong in one event's break-even are the materials in what actually sold. Counting the whole table against one weekend is how a fine event gets recorded as a bad one. The stock figure is used only to express the break-even as a sell-through percentage, so you can see what share of the table has to move.
Because sales are not profit. Every dollar you take arrives with materials already spent on it and a card fee taken out of it, so only part of each dollar is left to cover the booth. At 30% materials and a card mix around 2.6% plus 10c, roughly 68c of each dollar is available — so a $370 day of fixed cost needs about $547 of sales, not $370. The calculator shows the kept-per-dollar figure it used.
That depends on what you expect to sell there and what you want your own hours to earn. Given both, the calculator solves for the booth fee at which the day lands exactly on your target hourly rate — that is the number to compare against an application before you send it. If it comes out negative, the expected sales cannot clear your target rate even at a free stall, which is a fact about the event's sales rather than about its organiser.
Your processor's fixed fee is charged per transaction, not per dollar. Ten cents on a $6 sticker sale is 1.7% of it; the same ten cents on an $80 print is 0.1%. A headline "2.6% + 10c" hides that difference completely, so a sticker table and a print table with identical percentages keep very different shares of each dollar. The calculator converts the fixed fee into a rate using your average order value, which is why that field matters more than it looks.
No. Every field on this page runs in your browser only, there is no account, and nothing you type is uploaded. Nothing leaves this device unless you choose to send it: the Copy shareable link button puts the figures on the form into the page's URL fragment, which a browser never sends to a server or into a Referer header, so it reaches only the person you hand the link to. Anyone who has that link can read the numbers in it, so send it the way you would send the numbers themselves. Usage counting only tallies anonymous feature events, and you can turn it off with the button above.
New to costing a market? Read the guide: how much you need to sell at a craft fair to break even.