How to price a custom product

Why guessing doesn't work

It's tempting to price by feel — look at what a similar maker charges, add a bit for your materials, round it to something that sounds fair. The problem is that this method has no way of telling you whether you're actually making money. It only tells you whether your price sounds reasonable, which is a completely different thing. A price built on feel can sit below your real costs for months without you ever noticing, because the order still "sells" — it just quietly doesn't pay you for your time.

A real price is built from four separate numbers, added together on purpose: materials, your own labour, a share of your overhead, and a genuine margin on top. Skip any one of them and the price is, mathematically, too low — even if it feels right.

1. Materials — all of them, not just the obvious ones

Most makers cost the main component correctly and then forget everything around it — packaging, trims, labels, the small finishing touches that don't feel like "real" materials. Individually these feel too small to matter. Added up across every order in a month, they rarely are.

A reliable way to catch this: physically list every single thing that goes into the finished product and its packaging, cost each one at what you actually paid for it, and total it before moving to the next step.

2. Your own time — priced, not donated

This is the step most makers skip entirely, usually without realising it. If you don't put a number on your own hours, you're not actually "covering your costs" — you are the cost, and you're covering yourself for free.

Pick an hourly rate for your own time — what you'd want to earn doing this work, not what minimum wage happens to be. Then track, honestly, how long a given order actually takes from start to finish, including the fiddly parts (packaging, messaging the customer, cleanup) that don't feel like "real" work but genuinely are. Multiply the two together. That number goes into the price the same way materials do — not as an afterthought.

3. Overhead — the cost of simply being in business

Overhead is everything that keeps your business running but isn't tied to one specific order: a share of your rent or home workspace, utilities, software subscriptions, equipment wearing out over time, insurance. None of it shows up in a single order's materials list, which is exactly why it's the easiest cost to forget.

A simple way to bring it into your pricing: add up your overhead costs for a typical month, estimate how many orders you make in that same month, and divide one by the other. That gives you a rough overhead cost per order to add in alongside materials and labour. It won't be perfectly precise, but it's a genuine number instead of zero — and zero is the actual mistake most makers are making.

4. Margin — the part that makes it a business

Materials, labour and overhead only get you to break-even — the point where you've been paid back for what the order genuinely cost you, including your own time. A margin on top of that is what actually grows the business: covering the orders that go wrong, the slow months, and eventually letting you reinvest rather than just surviving order to order.

There's no single "correct" margin — it varies by craft and market — but a common starting point many small makers use is adding 20–40% on top of their full cost (materials + labour + overhead), then adjusting from there once they see how demand responds.

Putting it together

A simple example: materials come to $12, your time is 1.5 hours at a $25/hour rate ($37.50), and your rough overhead-per-order works out to $4. That's a full cost of $53.50 — the actual amount this order costs you to make, time included. A 30% margin on top brings the price to roughly $70. Anything below that line isn't a discount — it's you paying part of the order yourself, without realising it.

Pricing examples by craft

The method is identical across every craft — materials, labour, overhead, margin — but what it actually looks like differs a lot in practice. Here's the same four-step approach worked through for a few common crafts.

In every case above, none of these numbers are the price yet — they're the full cost. The margin from the step before still gets added on top of each one.

Where this gets hard to keep up by hand

The method above is genuinely sound — but doing it by hand for every single order, especially once ingredient prices shift or you're juggling more than a handful of orders a week, gets tedious fast. That's the point where most makers quietly fall back to guessing again, simply because the spreadsheet became more work than the making. Purpose-built tools like CreatorsCogs exist to carry this calculation automatically, so the real numbers stay attached to every order without it becoming its own part-time job.