Craft pricing calculator
What to charge for something you made, with your time counted as a cost instead of a rounding error. Two pricing rules side by side, and what each one pays you per hour.
Most craft pricing advice skips the expensive part
Materials get counted because they arrive with a receipt. Time doesn't. So the shirt that took forty minutes to design, weed, press and pack gets priced on four dollars of vinyl, sells well, and the maker quietly works for about three dollars an hour while wondering why a growing shop feels worse than a slow one.
This calculator refuses to let the time disappear. You give it a rate, it costs the minutes at that rate, and then every price it suggests is shown with the hourly it actually pays you after materials. Set a floor and it will tell you plainly when a price falls under it.
Two rules, shown together
Cost × multiplier is the craft-fair standard: add up cost, double it for wholesale, double again for retail. It is quick, it is memorable, and it silently assumes your labour rate was honest — double a bad number and you get a bad number twice.
Target margin works the other way: price = cost ÷ (1 − margin). It reserves a fixed share of every sale for the business rather than for your wage, which is what pays for the next machine. On materials-heavy work it is much steadier than doubling, and the calculator says so when your materials dominate.
The numbers people forget
- Packing time. It is real time and it happens on every single order.
- Spoilage. The ones you ruin are paid for by the ones you sell. Put it in overhead.
- Consumables that wear out slowly. Mats, blades, transfer tape, press sheets.
- The listing fee you pay whether or not it sells.
Price the item first, then check the channel. This tool works out what the making needs to earn. What a marketplace leaves you afterwards is a separate subtraction — take the price straight to the fee and profit calculator and see whether it still stands up.
Questions
What is the right formula for pricing handmade work?
There isn't one, and any site that tells you otherwise is selling certainty rather than arithmetic. There are two rules in wide use, and this calculator runs both at once so you can see where they disagree: cost times a multiplier (the craft-fair standard), and a target margin (what a shop uses when it wants to grow). Where they land far apart, that gap is telling you something about your materials-to-time ratio.
Why does it keep asking what I pay myself?
Because that is the number that decides whether this is a business or an expensive hobby. Materials are easy to count and everyone counts them. Two hours of weeding and packing costs just as much and usually gets entered as zero. Put a real hourly figure in, set your floor, and every price here is checked against it.
What counts as overhead per item?
Everything the item consumes that is not the item: blades and mats wearing out, transfer tape, the electricity, the listing fee you pay whether it sells or not, and the ones you ruin. A rough number is far better than zero — most makers find it lands between a few cents and a couple of units per piece once they count the spoilage honestly.
Should wholesale really be half of retail?
That is the convention, because a shop that buys from you has to pay its own rent out of the difference. What matters is that your wholesale price still covers cost and pays you, which is what the hourly figure under each price is for. If wholesale pays you less than your floor, you cannot afford to wholesale at that cost — either the making gets faster or the price goes up.
Does this include marketplace fees?
No, deliberately. This works out what the item needs to earn; fees come off the top of the sale afterwards and depend on where you sell it. Take the price it gives you and run it through the fee calculator to see what a marketplace leaves behind.