Handmade pricing calculator
The most common handmade pricing mistake is paying yourself nothing. This calculator refuses to let you: labor is a cost, not a leftover.
How the price builds up
Materials plus labor is your true cost. Overhead — a percentage on top for everything that is not one specific item: tools wearing out, packaging, electricity, the failed batches — turns hobby math into business math; if you have no better number, something in the 10–20% range is a common starting point. Platform fees then gross the whole thing up so the fee comes out of the buyer's side, not out of your labor.
The number this produces is a floor, not a recommendation. If comparable work sells for more, charge more; the difference is profit beyond your wage. If comparable work sells for less than your floor, the answer is not to cut your hourly rate to zero — it is that this product, at this speed, does not work as a business, which is worth knowing before you take fifty orders.
Underpricing hurts more than your own income: it also anchors buyers to prices no one can sustainably make things at.
Questions
What hourly rate should I use?
At minimum, what your time is worth doing anything else — local minimum wage is the absolute floor. Skilled work deserves a skilled rate: if the craft took years to learn, the rate should reflect that, not apologize for it.
What goes into overhead?
Costs that are real but not tied to a single item: equipment and its wear, packaging supplies, workspace costs, software subscriptions, listing fees on items that never sold, and materials lost to mistakes. A flat percentage is an approximation, but a much better one than pretending those costs are zero.
The result seems too expensive to sell. Now what?
Three honest options: get faster (labor is usually the biggest slice), redesign the product to need less time or material, or sell somewhere buyers pay for handmade quality. Cutting your wage to zero is not a pricing strategy, it is a donation.