How to price machine embroidery

The standard way to price machine embroidery is a rate per 1,000 stitches, plus the cost of the blank with a markup, plus flat fees for setup work like hooping and digitizing. The working range most shops use is $1 to $3 per 1,000 stitches, with $1.50 to $2 being the common middle. A left-chest logo around 8,000 stitches at $1.50 per thousand is $12 of stitching before the garment, and that is the honest starting point for the whole calculation.

That paragraph is the answer. The rest of this guide is why the range is that wide, what the formula leaves out, and the places where new embroiderers reliably underprice themselves. If you want to skip the arithmetic, the free embroidery pricing calculator does all of this math with editable numbers and no account.

What is the per-1,000-stitches method?

Every embroidery design has a stitch count, which your embroidery software or your digitizer reports. You charge a rate for each 1,000 stitches, because stitch count is a fair proxy for machine time, thread use, and wear on your equipment. A 5,000-stitch monogram runs quickly; a 60,000-stitch jacket back ties up the machine for a long stretch, and the price should reflect that.

The full formula most shops use looks like this:

1. 1Stitching: stitch count ÷ 1,000, times your rate.
2. 2Blank: what you paid for the garment or item, marked up. Doubling the blank cost is the common default.
3. 3Setup fees: hooping, thread changes beyond a baseline, and any digitizing.
4. 4A shop minimum, so a tiny design on a customer-supplied towel does not turn into a $6 order that costs you 40 minutes.

The calculator's defaults, which you can and should edit to your own numbers, are $1.50 per 1,000 stitches, blank cost times two, $5 for hooping, a $35 digitizing fee, and a $30 order minimum.

Where in the $1 to $3 range should you be?

The range is wide because it is carrying several real differences between shops:

• Machine and overhead. A shop running a multi-needle commercial machine with a lease payment prices differently than a single-needle home machine that is already paid off. Your rate has to cover your actual costs, not somebody else's.
• Quantity. The per-thousand rate typically slides down for volume, because hooping piece 40 of the same design is faster than hooping piece one of a new one. Many shops publish a rate that drops in tiers at 12, 24, and 48 pieces.
• Complexity. Caps, sleeves, zipped hoodies, and anything that fights the hoop take more time per piece than a flat left chest. Some shops handle this with a higher rate, others with a flat difficulty surcharge. Either works; ignoring it does not.
• Market. Corporate logo work for a business customer supports higher rates than personalized gifts sold to neighbors, because the buyer is comparing you to uniform companies rather than to a craft fair.

If you have no better information, start at $1.50 per 1,000 with a $30 minimum and adjust from your own results. Being at the very bottom of the range is a red flag, not a competitive advantage: the shops charging $1 per thousand are usually not counting their time.

What should you charge for the blank?

Charge for the garment even when it feels like a pass-through, and mark it up. Doubling your cost is the standard default: a $6 tee becomes $12 on the invoice. The markup is not padding. It covers shipping the blank in, carrying inventory, the occasional misordered size, and the risk that this specific piece is the one the machine eats.

Customer-supplied garments deserve their own policy, and most experienced shops either decline them or charge a handling fee and require a signed waiver. When the customer's own jacket gets damaged mid-run, there is no replacement blank on your shelf, and the conversation that follows is one you want to have settled in writing beforehand.

What is a digitizing fee and when do you charge it?

Digitizing is converting artwork into a stitch file, and it is skilled work whether you do it yourself or send it out. A one-time digitizing fee of roughly $20 to $80 for a typical logo is normal, charged on the first order and not on repeats. If you outsource digitizing, the fee should cover what the digitizer charges you plus your time managing the file.

Two policies to decide up front. First, whether the customer owns the stitch file, because many shops keep it and treat it as what brings the customer back. Second, lettering-only work in fonts you already own usually needs no digitizing fee at all, and charging one anyway is the kind of thing customers eventually notice.

What about hooping and setup fees?

A flat hooping or setup fee, commonly $3 to $7 per piece for one-off work, pays for the part of the job the stitch count cannot see: stabilizer, hooping, thread changes, positioning, and trimming. On personalized one-off pieces this fee matters more than the stitch rate, because a 4,000-stitch name still takes nearly the same handling as a 12,000-stitch design. If you do mostly one-offs and personalization, underweighting setup is probably the single biggest hole in your pricing.

How do you price personalized items like names and monograms?

Per-stitch math tends to underprice personalization, because names are low-stitch-count but high-handling: a confirmed spelling, a font choice, a placement decision, and a mockup all happen per order. Most shops solve this by pricing personalized items as finished products instead. The stitched name on a beach towel is "$28 personalized towel," a number built from the formula once and then reused, rather than a fresh per-stitch calculation for every order.

This is also where remakes live. One towel restitched because a spelling was never confirmed erases the margin on several orders, so the pricing and the confirmation process are two halves of the same protection. Getting the customer to approve the exact wording before stitching is worth more than any surcharge.

What does the formula leave out?

Three things, and all of them are why two shops with the same rate can have very different years.

• Your hourly floor. After the formula produces a price, divide it by the real time the job takes, including messages, mockups, hooping, and packing. If the answer is under your area's minimum wage, the formula's inputs are wrong for that kind of job, usually the setup fee.
• The order minimum. Small orders cost nearly as much labor as medium ones. A $25 to $35 minimum is normal and customers rarely blink at it.
• Quoting consistency. The formula only protects you if the same job gets the same price twice. Keeping every past order's price where you can look it up beats re-deriving it from memory, which is one of the jobs order management software exists to do.

How do you raise prices without losing customers?

Announce it plainly, give a date, and honor quotes already given. Most price-raise fear is out of proportion to what actually happens: the customers who leave over a fair increase are usually the ones whose orders were barely profitable. If your calendar is full and you are tired, that is the market telling you the price is too low, and raising it is the correct response, not a betrayal of anyone.

A practical sequence: recalculate your real costs once a year, since blanks, thread, and stabilizer all move; set the new prices with the formula; and notify repeat customers a few weeks ahead. New customers just see the new price and have no old one to compare it to.

Run your own numbers

Every number in this guide is a default, not a rule. The embroidery pricing calculator takes your stitch count, your rate, your blank cost, and your fees, and shows the price and where it came from. It is free, it needs no account, and every field is editable, because the only pricing formula that works is the one built from your shop's actual costs.