Base product cost is only one variable. Platform fees, shipping, advertising and reprints decide whether a product actually makes money, and most calculators leave them out. This one models all of them across the three biggest print-on-demand platforms, Printful, Printify and Gelato.
Pick one of the products below and the costs are already filled in. If you are looking at something we have not listed, choose Add your own product, drop in the base price from each of the three, and everything else keeps working: shipping, marketplace fees, tax, ads and reprints are all still applied. Found a mug you like on all three platforms with the same print method? Enter three numbers and you will see which one actually pays.
Effect on profit per order of a twenty percent change in each input, holding everything else steady.
Identical retail price, platform, region and assumptions. Only the supplier changes. A blank row means that supplier does not offer this product and technique in this region, which is itself worth knowing.
We are not interested in crowning one universal best platform, and the highlight above is not a verdict. The cheapest supplier changes with product, region, technique and volume, which is exactly why this compares your setup rather than publishing a winner.
We are not paid by any of these three, and there are no affiliate links on this page. The figures above come from the same stored dataset for all of them.
Profit is worked out per order and then divided down to a per-unit figure, rather than calculated per unit from the start. That sounds like a technicality and it is not. Several real costs are charged once per order no matter how many items it contains: the marketplace listing fee, the fixed part of payment processing, the first-item shipping rate, and the advertising it took to win the customer. A per-unit model cannot represent the gap between first-item and additional-item shipping, and that gap is the single biggest source of error in the calculators we have checked.
Gross order value is the retail price times units, less any discount, plus whatever you charge for shipping. If your price is tax-inclusive, which is normal across the EU and UK, the tax comes out to give net revenue. Marketplace fees still apply to the gross figure, because that is how marketplaces charge them.
gross order value = (retail price x units x (1 - discount)) + shipping charged net revenue = gross order value / (1 + tax rate)
Base unit cost depends on the product, the print technique, the production region and whether you are paying for a subscription tier. Extra print placements are charged per unit, every time. Embroidery also carries a digitization fee, which converts your artwork into a stitch file. That fee is charged once per design, not once per order, so it is divided across the units you expect that design to sell before it enters the per-order stack.
supplier cost = (base unit cost + extra placements) x units
+ shipping first item
+ shipping each extra item x (units - 1)
+ (digitization fee / units per design) x units
Marketplace fees come in four shapes, and mixing them up is the most common error we see in published calculators.
Payment processing is set by your seller country on Etsy, where Etsy Payments is mandatory and you do not get to choose a processor. On Shopify and on your own site you do choose, and the rates differ enough to matter. A third-party gateway on Shopify also adds a surcharge on top of whatever that gateway charges you.
Monthly costs, whether a Shopify plan or a supplier subscription, are divided by your monthly order count. The per-order burden falls as volume rises, which is the entire argument for paying for one.
Three lines routinely decide whether a product is viable, and they are usually missing.
Two separate inputs drive volume, and confusing them is how sellers talk themselves into a number that never arrives. Units per order is how many items are in a typical basket. Orders per month is how many baskets you get. Ten orders of one item and two orders of five are both ten units, but they are not the same business: the two-order version ships fewer parcels, pays fewer listing and processing fees, and on our own defaults earns roughly sixty percent more profit on identical revenue.
The headline figure is total profit for the month, because per-order profit flatters a business that is not selling much. Per-order and per-unit figures sit underneath it.
Break-even is the retail price at which profit is exactly zero with everything else held steady. Target price is the price that produces the margin you asked for. Both are solved numerically rather than with a formula, so they stay correct when a platform changes the shape of its fees rather than just the percentage.
A Bella + Canvas 3001 t-shirt from Printify, sold on Etsy in the United States at $24.99 with free shipping, one unit per order, no discount and no sales tax at checkout. The base cost and shipping here are Printify's own published figures for the United States. The fee percentages are Etsy's published structure.
| Line | How it is calculated | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | Retail price, free shipping | 24.99 |
| Base product cost | Printify, Bella + Canvas 3001, DTG | -9.82 |
| Supplier shipping | First item, domestic | -3.99 |
| Listing fee | Fixed, charged again on each sale | -0.20 |
| Transaction fee | 6.5% of 24.99 | -1.62 |
| Payment processing | 3% of 24.99 plus 0.25, US rate | -1.00 |
| Offsite Ads | 15% of 24.99, on 20% of orders | -0.75 |
| Advertising | Cost to win one order | -1.50 |
| Reprints and losses | 3% of product plus shipping cost | -0.41 |
| Profit per order | 22.8% margin | 5.69 |
Now run the version most sellers do in their head. Base cost, plus shipping, plus the 6.5 percent transaction fee, leaves $9.56 and a 38.2 percent margin. That looks like a business. The five lines usually left out take $3.86 of it, and the margin lands at 22.8 percent instead. At a hundred orders a month that gap is $386, which is the difference between a side income and a hobby. This is the most common reason a product that worked on a spreadsheet loses money in practice, and it is why we built this.
Fee structures rather than live quotes. Percentages change, and payment processing in particular varies by country and by plan. Check the platform's own fee page, linked below, before you rely on a number.
| Platform | Listing | Transaction | Processing | Monthly | Notes |
|---|
| Supplier | Subscription | Product discount | Shipping discount | Digitization | Regions |
|---|
Every figure in this calculator comes from a published price or fee page. Here they are, so you can confirm anything that looks wrong rather than taking our word for it.
Most calculators model three costs: base product cost, shipping and one marketplace fee. A real order also carries payment processing, which is a percentage plus a fixed amount, Offsite Ads on a share of orders, your own advertising spend, the cost of reprints and lost packages, subscription fees spread across your monthly volume, and VAT if you price tax-inclusive. Together those lines commonly account for twenty to forty percent of the cost of an order.
It is the share of your orders that have to be produced a second time. A print comes out wrong, a shirt arrives damaged, or a parcel never reaches the customer. You send a replacement and you do not get paid twice for it, so the supplier cost of that replacement is a real cost spread across every order you ship. Most sellers see somewhere between one and five percent, and it climbs on fragile items and long international routes.
No, and this trips people up. Digitization converts your artwork into a stitch file, and it is charged once per design rather than once per order. That is why it looks brutal on a design that sells five units and vanishes on one that sells five hundred. Set units per design honestly and the calculator will show you where that crossover falls. Printify does not charge for digitization at all. Printful and Gelato do, and Printful's Growth plan covers it on sample orders only, not on live orders, so the calculator does not treat it as waived.
EU and UK prices are shown tax-inclusive, so a 25 euro price at a 21 percent VAT rate is 20.66 euro of net revenue and 4.34 euro you remit. Marketplace fees are still charged on the gross amount. Comparing an EU price against a US price without extracting VAT overstates EU margin by roughly the VAT rate, which is easily enough to flip a supplier comparison the wrong way round.
No. Etsy Payments is mandatory in the markets where it operates, and the processing rate is set by your seller country rather than by a processor you select. Processor choice is real on Shopify and on your own site, where Shopify Payments, PayPal and Stripe charge different rates, and where routing through a third-party gateway on Shopify adds a surcharge on top of that gateway's own fee. The calculator offers the choice only where the choice exists.
Substantially, and more than most sellers expect. Suppliers charge a high rate for the first item and a much lower rate for each additional one, and fixed per-order costs get spread across more units. Moving your average from one item to two usually improves profit per unit more than a price rise of the same size, and it is often easier to pull off.
When the per-order saving on product and shipping times your monthly order count exceeds the monthly fee. That is a volume question rather than a recommendation, so rather than tell you which tier to buy, the calculator reports the break-even order count for your own setup and lets you compare it against what you actually ship.
Stated plainly, because a calculator that hides its limits is worse than no calculator.