If you make custom work — embroidery, laser engraving, 3D prints, custom apparel — there's a good chance you're underpricing it. Not because you don't know your craft, but because pricing custom work is genuinely hard. There's no price tag on the shelf to copy. You're the one who has to figure it out, every single time.
Here are five mistakes I see (and made myself) constantly, plus what to do instead.
1. Pricing off "what feels fair" instead of real costs
It's tempting to land on a number that feels reasonable rather than one that's actually calculated. The problem: "feels reasonable" almost always skips your own labor time, and quietly eats your profit order after order.
Fix: Break every job into materials, machine time, and your hourly labor rate — separately, every time. Once you see it broken out, it's a lot harder to shortchange yourself.
2. Forgetting machine time has a cost
Your embroidery machine, laser cutter, or 3D printer isn't free to run. Electricity, wear, maintenance, and the fact that it's tied up on this job and not another one — that's all real cost, even if it doesn't show up on a receipt.
Fix: Give every machine an hourly "cost to run" number and build it into your price, the same way a shop would bill machine time.
3. Charging the same for simple and complex orders
A basic 3-letter monogram and a dense, multi-color custom design are not the same job — but a lot of makers price them the same because it's easier than recalculating every time.
Fix: Build a few pricing tiers based on complexity (stitch count, print time, design intricacy) so you're not doing custom math for every single order.
4. Not accounting for revisions and mockups
Customer wants to see three color options before committing? That's real time, and it's easy to give it away for free "just to be nice." Do that enough times and it adds up to hours of unpaid work a month.
Fix: Build a small number of revisions into your base price, and charge for anything beyond that — clearly, upfront.
5. Guessing instead of using a repeatable system
The biggest issue underneath all of these: most makers are re-deriving their pricing from scratch every time instead of using a consistent formula. That's exhausting, and it's why pricing feels stressful instead of automatic.
Fix: Use the same formula every time — materials + machine time + labor + margin — so pricing becomes a five-minute task instead of a guessing game.