How to build a screen printing pricing matrix

Most small shops price from memory, from a competitor's website, or from whatever felt right on the last job. That works until it doesn't — usually on a 24-piece three-colour order that somehow nets $40. A pricing matrix fixes it: one grid, decided once, used on every quote.

What a pricing matrix is

It's a grid. Quantity breaks run down the side, number of print colours across the top, and each cell holds your per-piece print pricefor that combination. That's it. Here's a typical starting grid:

Print price only — the garment and screen fees are added separately. These are industry-typical starting numbers, not your numbers.

The three things you add on top

1. 1. The garment, marked up. Take your blank cost and roughly double it. A $3.50 blank is charged at $7.00. This isn't greed — it covers ordering, receiving, counting, storing, and eating the cost when a box arrives short or a shirt gets misprinted. Shops that pass blanks through at cost lose money on every order they touch.
2. 2. Screens and setup. A one-time charge per colour, typically $15–$25 each. This is what makes small orders viable and what customers try to negotiate away. Hold the line: burning, taping, registering and reclaiming a screen costs you real time whether the order is 12 pieces or 1,200.
3. 3. The extras. Art time, rush fees, oversized prints, specialty inks, folding and bagging, shipping. Each should be a line item you can add, not something you absorb silently.

Setting your own numbers

Copying someone else's grid is a starting point, not an answer. Their rent, press, and labour aren't yours. To build your own, work out your true hourly cost:

Then, for a given quantity and colour count, estimate the run time (setup + printing + cleanup), multiply by your hourly rate, divide by the quantity, add ink and consumables, and you have your floor. The matrix cell should sit comfortably above it.

Why prices drop with quantity

Setup time is fixed. Registering a three-colour job takes the same 30 minutes whether you then print 24 shirts or 240. Spread over 24 pieces that's expensive per shirt; over 240 it nearly disappears. That — not generosity — is why the grid slopes downward. It also means your smallest quantity break needs to be priced high enough to survive on its own, because that's where setup dominates.

Five mistakes that cost money

• Quoting the 144 price on a 24-piece order because the customer sounded nice or hinted at future volume. Future volume is not current volume.
• Waiving screen fees to win the job. You just donated the most profitable part of the quote. Discount the per-piece price instead if you must move.
• Not tracking garment cost separately from garment price.If your quote only records what you charged, you can never see margin per job — and you won't notice when blank prices creep up.
• Not charging for art. "Just clean this logo up" is 45 minutes. Three of those a week is most of a working day, unbilled.
• Never revisiting the grid. Blanks, ink and electricity all moved in the last few years. If your matrix hasn't changed since you wrote it, you've quietly given yourself a pay cut.

Spreadsheet or software?

A spreadsheet is genuinely fine at low volume, and plenty of profitable shops run on one. Its real cost shows up in the retyping: you look up the price, retype it into an email or an invoice, then retype it again when the customer changes the quantity. That's where errors and hours go.

The alternative used to be a $99–$399/month shop-management platform, which is excellent if you also need production scheduling and purchasing — and absurd if you only wanted the quoting part.

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