Sublimation pricing calculator

Cost to make

Ink. We work out the area of your transfer, multiply by how much of it is actually covered, then by how much ink your printer lays down, then by what a millilitre costs you. A maintenance allowance is added on top for cleaning cycles — ink you bought but never printed.

ink = area(m²) × laydown × coverage × price × (1 + maintenance)

Failures. If one press in twenty goes wrong, you need twenty-one attempts' worth of materials to get twenty good items — so we divide by (1 − failure rate) rather than adding a percentage. Failures cost you the blank, ink, paper, your other consumables, the electricity for that press and your hands-on time. They also carry a share of the warm-up and the design/setup time. Those are paid once for the batch, but a batch that yields fewer good items has fewer items to spread them over, so each good one carries more — at the shipped defaults that is 3.3p of the “Failed presses” row in the breakdown above, and far more at a batch of one. What a failure does not cost you is the packaging (you catch it before packing) or Etsy's fees (it never gets listed).

Electricity. A press draws full power warming up, then cycles on and off to hold temperature. Warm-up is shared across the good items a batch yields; holding is per item. On most setups that's well under 1% of the cost, though a big flatbed warmed up to press a single item can reach a few percent — the breakdown above shows yours. We include it because leaving things out is how spreadsheets drift.

VAT on what you buy. On the standard scheme you reclaim it, so your true cost is the ex-VAT price. Not registered, or on the Flat Rate Scheme? You can't reclaim, so your cost is the full price on the receipt. Every box in “Cost to make” has its own VAT setting, and it has three answers, not two — the price includes VAT, VAT goes on top of it, or there is no VAT on it at all. That third one matters: rent and insurance are VAT-exempt, so a yes-or-no tickbox made you choose between a cost that was too low and a VAT reclaim that never existed. Postage keeps a two-way box instead, because the service you pick supplies its third answer. Electricity has no VAT box at all: type the rate the way your bill shows it — we treat it as VAT-included — and pick your supply above so we know the rate. If your bill quotes p/kWh before VAT, add it on before you type it. Your own time never carries VAT.

What you keep

The order matters. Your discount comes off first — the customer pays less, so Etsy's cut is smaller too. Fees are charged on what was actually paid, plus postage. Then VAT is added to those fees, unless Etsy holds your VAT number, in which case they don't charge it at all.

Zero-rated is not the same as exported. Children's clothing may qualify for zero rating; exports also need to meet the relevant conditions and evidence requirements. These calculator options assume the sale qualifies, so neither includes output VAT. Check HMRC’s export guidance for your situation. The difference is the parcel: a zero-rated item posted inside the UK on a Tracked service normally carries 20% VAT you can reclaim — the VAT on this postage service box is where you tell us what your invoice actually says — while international services are exempt or zero-rated and carry none.

If a box isn't a number, we stop. We check the whole box parses, not just the start of it — 2O.00 typed with a letter O is rejected rather than quietly read as £2.00. A box we can't read is outlined in red, and while any red box feeds the answer, every figure below is held back rather than left showing you a result for inputs you've since changed.

Two exceptions, both deliberate. The target box and the three calibration boxes turn red on their own and hold back only their own answer, because nothing else depends on them. And a box that is a number but can't be right — a negative price, a discount of 100% — holds everything back with a message naming the box instead of a red outline, because there's nothing wrong with the way it was typed. Your typing is still saved, so nothing is lost on reload.

What this leaves out. Four things, on purpose, so you can add them yourself if they apply to you. Currency conversion — if you list in a currency you aren't paid in, Etsy converts it and charges a conversion fee, which isn't in any figure on this page. Refunds and cancellations — this prices one completed sale, so a refund rate is yours to allow for on top. The Climate Change Levy — on a business electricity tariff it's a line on your bill; the p/kWh box above is whatever your own bill says, and we don't add anything to it. And your VAT return — see below.

This does not work out your VAT return. If you're VAT-registered it shows the VAT on this sale, and it takes the VAT you can reclaim off your costs so that the profit is right. What it does not do is add those up into a figure you could copy onto a return: that's a whole-quarter job across every sale, purchase and credit note, and a one-order page can't see any of it. The estimate follows the VAT settings you select; it does not establish whether you qualify to reclaim VAT. For the return itself use your bookkeeping, or HMRC's guidance.

Postage. Charged and cost are both per order, so with two items in an order each carries half. Whether a service carries VAT is your answer, not ours: Royal Mail publishes no table we can read, so ours is our own reading and we have had a row of it wrong before. Picking a service fills in the VAT on this postage service box with our best guess — Tracked and couriers 20%, stamps exempt, international exempt or zero-rated — and you can overrule it. Your invoice shows the VAT, and your invoice wins. Exempt means there is nothing to reclaim: being VAT-registered doesn't make stamps cheaper.

Margin and markup are different numbers. Margin is profit as a slice of revenue per item, including its share of postage, after the VAT on the sale (or your flat-rate payment). Markup is profit against what it cost to make. Pricing at three times cost is a 200% trade markup and a 66.7% gross margin — but by the time fees, VAT and postage are through it, what you keep is a lot less.

Working backwards is exact, not trial and error — profit moves in a straight line with price, so there's a formula. (The one exception is Etsy's $100 Offsite Ads cap: once that bites, we solve again with the fee fixed.) We round the suggested price up to the next penny so you hit your target rather than missing it by 1p, then show you the profit you actually get at that price.