Free tool
Work out what to charge — or what to expect to pay — for digitizing an embroidery design. Pick the design type, add the stitch count, flag a rush, and you'll get a fee with the reasoning shown. Every rate is editable. It's free and there's no signup. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Pick what kind of design it is. The base fee for each type is editable, so put your own rates in.
The base fee covers a normal-sized design. Past that, more stitches mean more pathing work, so bigger designs charge for the overage.
Estimated is fine before it's digitized.
A left-chest logo tops out around here.
Only on stitches past the included count.
One round of tweaks after the sew-out is normally included. Count the rounds beyond that.
Editable — some shops fold small edits in and charge only for redesigns.
Charged once per design
$25.00
This is a one-time charge for a new design. It doesn't repeat per piece, and it doesn't repeat when the same customer reorders the same design — the file is already made and already paid for.
Digitizing is the work of turning artwork into a stitch file — the set of instructions a machine embroidery machine follows. A person decides which parts get satin stitch and which get fill, what direction the stitches run, how dense they are, what underlay goes beneath them so the design doesn't sink into the fabric, and the order everything sews in so the fabric doesn't pull as it stitches. Then they test-stitch it and fix what the test reveals.
None of that is stitching, which is why it's a separate charge from the embroidery itself. The pricing calculator handles the per-piece embroidery price; this page handles the one-time fee for making the file.
We checked this against published rate cards and working embroiderers rather than repeating a number everyone copies from everyone else. For a simple left-chest logo, verified retail rates run $10 to $25: one Alabama shop charges a $10 minimum paid up front, a Nevada shop charges $25 flat for in-house digitizing and reuses the file free forever, and embroiderers in community forums report $25 setups that include digitizing and are waived on reorders. Contract and larger shops sit higher — one wholesale embroiderer charges $49 for designs up to five inches — and shops note that complex work goes for $50 to $100 and up.
Under the retail market sits the outsourced floor. Dedicated digitizing services charge roughly $8 to $17for that same simple logo, with published minimums as low as $7.50. If you outsource, that's your cost, not your price — the gap between the two pays for your artwork prep, your file review, and your test stitch.
The formula this calculator runs
Fee = base fee for the design type + (stitches past the included count, per 1,000, at your rate) + extra revision rounds
Rush adds a percentage on top of that subtotal
Complexity is the real driver of digitizing time, and design type is the honest proxy for it. Text in a standard font is quick. A clean logo with defined shapes takes real pathing decisions but no surprises. Complex artwork — fine detail, gradients, a photo someone wants "as embroidery," art that has to be redrawn before it can be digitized at all — takes multiples of the time, and the base fee should say so. The defaults here ($15, $25, and $45) sit inside the verified 2026 ranges, and all three are editable because your market and your skill set the real number.
A jacket back isn't a left-chest logo scaled up — it's more elements, more pathing, more underlay planning, and a longer test stitch. Rather than a separate price list for every size, the calculator includes a normal logo's worth of stitches in the base fee (12,000 by default, about the top of the left-chest range) and charges per 1,000 past that. It's the same logic digitizing services themselves use, where small designs get a flat minimum and large ones are priced per thousand stitches.
An overnight file means your evening reshuffles and the test stitch happens at a worse hour. Published rate cards put rush work around 50% over standard, climbing toward 100% for a true overnight, which is why the toggle defaults to 50. Put it on the quote as its own line so the customer sees they're paying for the schedule, not a higher price for the same thing.
One round of minor tweaks after the sew-out belongs in the base fee — it's part of getting the file right. What doesn't belong there: new artwork after approval, "actually can we make it bigger" past a resize the file can absorb, or a third round of nudging letters. Decide where your line is, tell the customer where it is before you start, and charge past it without apologizing. The calculator's revision field is for exactly those rounds.
The digitizing fee is one-time per design. Not per piece, not per order — once. When the same customer comes back for ten more shirts with the same logo, the digitizing line is zero, and it's worth saying that out loud on the first quote: "this part you never pay again." Shops that reuse files free forever consistently say it's a reason customers come back. The flip side: the file you made is an asset, so store it where you can find it, with a record of the size, the fabric it was tested on, and the thread colors the customer approved.
The same numbers work in reverse. If a shop quotes you $20 to digitize your logo, that's squarely inside the verified market, not an upsell — and it buys you a file that should come with a test sew-out. If a quote seems high, ask what it includes: a complex redraw, multiple sizes, or source artwork that's a low-resolution screenshot can all legitimately move the number. And keep your file. You paid for it, most shops will hand it over, and it means you're never locked to one vendor.
For a simple left-chest logo, published 2026 shop rates run about $10 to $25, and some shops charge $50 to $100 or more for complex work. If a shop sends the digitizing out, the wholesale services underneath the market charge roughly $8 to $17 for that same simple logo, which is what sets the floor. Complex artwork with fine detail, gradients, or redrawing involved climbs to $35 to $50 and beyond. It's a one-time cost per design — reorders stitch from the same file for free.
More than it costs you, and charged as your own fee, not a pass-through. If you pay a digitizing service $12 for a logo, you still spent time collecting clean artwork, writing up the size and fabric, reviewing the file, and running the test stitch — that's real work the fee has to cover. Charging $25 for a $12 outsourced file isn't padding, it's the service of turning a customer's JPEG into a file that stitches correctly. Most small shops land in exactly that pattern.
Because auto-digitized files stitch badly, and everyone who has run one knows the look: dense patches that bunch the fabric, gaps where fills don't meet, satin stitches breaking up, small text turning to mush. Real digitizing is a person deciding stitch types, directions, densities, underlay, and the order the machine sews in — decisions that depend on the fabric, the size, and what the design has to survive. The fee pays for those decisions and the test stitch that proves them.
Neither — it's charged once per design. One shirt or fifty, the digitizing line on the quote is the same, because the work happens once. And when the same customer comes back next season for more of the same design, there's no digitizing charge at all: the file exists and it's already paid for. Shops that make this explicit on quotes find it's one of the things that brings reorders back.
Usually, yes. A name or monogram in a standard embroidery font is fast work in any digitizing software, and many shops fold small lettering into a low flat setup fee — published rates for simple text start around $20, and some shops do names for less or free with an order. The exception is tiny text: letters under about a quarter inch tall are genuinely hard to make stitch cleanly and can take more fiddling than a logo. Price text by the work, not the word count.
A percentage of the fee, in line with rush pricing generally — published 2026 rate cards land around 50% for expedited work and up to 100% for a true overnight turnaround. Digitizing rush charges exist for the same reason any rush charge does: your queue gets reshuffled and the test stitch still has to happen, just at a worse hour. If a customer regularly needs overnight files, that's a customer whose pricing should assume it.
State it on the quote so nobody has to guess. A normal package is: the stitch file in your machine's format at the agreed size, a test sew-out, and one round of minor tweaks after the customer sees it. Resizing a design more than about 20%, changing the artwork itself, or a redesign after approval is new work and charged as such. The calculator on this page has a field for extra revision rounds for exactly that reason.
Broidry is order-management software for machine embroidery shops. Your digitized designs live in one searchable library with your thread colors and fonts, tied to the orders they were stitched on — so a reorder means pulling the file, not re-digitizing it or digging through email attachments. Orders from Etsy, Facebook, text, and email land on one list with a price, a status, and a due date.
The calculator above stays free either way.