FREE CALCULATOR
Price crafts, candles, jewelry and other handmade goods so you get paid for your time — not just your materials.
Profit here is retail price minus your cost to make (materials, labor at your wage, overhead). Marketplace and payment fees, shipping and taxes come out of the retail price — use the reseller profit & fee calculator to see what you actually keep after Etsy or other platform fees. Numbers are estimates for planning.
The most common handmade pricing mistake is charging for materials and treating your own time as free. A candle with $8 of wax and jars that takes 45 minutes to make has $15 of labor at $20 an hour — more than the materials. Add a little overhead for packaging, tools and utilities, and that is your real cost to make. Anything you charge above it is what is left for the business.
A common rule of thumb is to price wholesale at about double your cost to make, and retail at about double wholesale. Even if you only sell direct to customers today, building the retail price this way leaves room to offer a wholesale price to shops, run a sale, or absorb marketplace fees without losing money. If the result looks too high for your market, work on lowering your cost (faster production, bulk materials) before cutting the price below your wage.
Log every sale and it works out real profit after cost of goods, platform fees and shipping, with monthly and per-platform totals and a running tax set-aside. Excel and Google Sheets.
Add up materials, your labor (time multiplied by the hourly wage you want) and a share of overhead to get your cost to make, then multiply to reach wholesale and retail prices.
Wholesale is roughly double your cost to make and retail is roughly double wholesale. It is a rule of thumb, not a law - adjust the multipliers for your market.
No. Marketplace, payment and shipping costs come out of the retail price. Use the reseller profit calculator to see what you keep after fees.
Free to use, no sign-up. Built by Gragg Robotics, LLC in Waterville, Maine. More free tools: all calculators.