Our pricing methodology
The reasoning every calculator on this site shares.
Last updated
Price is solved for, never marked up
Both your target margin and your percentage selling fees are shares of the final price — which is the number you are trying to find. That makes it an equation, not a multiplication.
Price = (cost + fixed fees) ÷ (1 − target margin − fee rate). Multiplying your cost by one plus the margin computes a markup instead, and always undershoots: a 40% markup delivers a 28.6% margin.
Money never touches a floating-point number
In JavaScript, 0.1 + 0.2 is 0.30000000000000004. Small errors like that accumulate across a cost stack and can round a break-even price a cent low. Every monetary value in these tools is a decimal from the moment it is parsed to the moment it is displayed, and rounding happens only at the very end.
Waste is a replacement cost
If 5% of your material is unusable, adding 5% is not enough — you have to buy enough to replace what you lose. We divide by (1 − waste rate) rather than multiplying by (1 + waste rate).
At a 5% rate the two methods differ by 0.25%, which is nothing. At 30% they differ by 36%, which is not. The method is labelled on every calculator that uses it.
Fixed costs are charged once
Design and setup happen once per job, not once per item. Charging them per item inflates every batch quote; spreading them across a batch understates every one-off. Both errors are common and both are expensive.
Machine time is charged in whole runs, because a machine cannot run part of a cycle. Thirteen items at six per run is three runs, not 2.17.
Errors and warnings mean different things
An error means the number cannot be computed at all — the calculator refuses rather than inventing something. A warning means the arithmetic is valid but the result is commercially dangerous: a price below cost, a discount larger than the profit, a wholesale price under your margin floor.
We are careful not to warn on correct input. A warning that fires when nothing is wrong teaches people to ignore warnings, which disarms the ones that matter.
Effective hourly earnings
Most calculators report what a job actually paid per hour of human time. It is usually more decision-useful than a margin percentage, because it answers the real question: was this order worth the afternoon, compared with everything else you could have done with it?