Price your handmade work for real profit — not on gut feel
If you sell handmade, one question quietly decides whether your shop makes money: what does each thing you make really cost? It’s easy to stop at materials and multiply by some comfortable-sounding number — leaving out your labor, your overhead, and the cut the marketplace takes on every sale. A price that looks healthy can pay you almost nothing.
The Handmade-Seller Pricing & Profit Workbook counts all of it. List a product’s materials, the packaging it ships in, the minutes it takes and the wage you pay yourself, and the overhead it carries — that’s your true cost. The workbook then marks it up to a retail price and a wholesale price, nets out the marketplace’s cut, and shows the real profit on each listing — so you can see which products actually make money.
It’s one file you own — a 7-tab workbook that works in Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice — not another monthly app to rent.
What’s inside the workbook
- Price a Product — the flagship. Materials + packaging + labor + overhead → your true cost, then a fee-aware retail and wholesale price and the profit (and take-home per hour) on each. Pre-loaded with a worked example you overwrite with your own products.
- Pricing Lab — markup is not margin, and the gap is your money. Set the margin you need and it hands you the markup and the cost multiplier to charge, with a keystone explainer and a full margin → markup table.
- Overhead Calculator — add up a year of booth fees, subscriptions, tools, and your camera, and it works out the per-item overhead every product must carry.
- Marketplace Fees — your listing, transaction, payment, and ads fees in one place. The pricing tabs read it, so the profit you see is what’s left after the cut — with a channel-by-channel reference.
- Materials Library — your own price book. Enter what a pack, spool, or hide costs and how many units it holds, and the true cost per unit divides down for you.
- Product Catalog — every product by cost, price, fees, profit, and margin, so you can finally see which listings carry the shop and which only look busy.
A Read Me tab ties the six working tabs together. And it’s not just a spreadsheet: four plain-language guides cover paying yourself a wage, marking cost up to a price, handling marketplace fees, setting wholesale, and raising prices without losing customers — plus a printable-worksheets PDF for costing by hand (five PDFs in all).
Pay yourself first — then add profit
The single line most makers leave out is their own time. This workbook puts your labor inside cost at an hourly wage you choose, so the markup on top is real profit — not your wage in disguise. In the workbook’s worked example, counting an hour of work at a fair wage turns a $6 pile of materials into a $32.50 true cost; priced right, the same piece earns $37.64 after fees instead of a few dollars.
Markup is not margin — and keystone has its limits
A “50% markup” is not a 50% margin. Add 50% to a $20 cost and you’ve kept only 33% of the price. The Pricing Lab converts the margin you need into the markup to charge for you, and explains where keystone (double the cost) fits — and where, for labor-heavy handmade, it doesn’t.
Retail and wholesale, in the right relationship
Sell to shops as well as to buyers? The workbook gives you a wholesale price alongside your retail, and the guides walk the wholesale-to-retail ladder so your own price never undercuts the stores that carry you.
Own it, don’t rent it
This sits exactly where you want a pricing tool: between a blank spreadsheet (free, but you build every formula) and a monthly SaaS app (powerful, but rented forever and overkill for a small shop). It’s a done-for-you pricing system you buy once and keep — your numbers stay in your file, yours forever.
When your shop outgrows a spreadsheet, it graduates cleanly to Ardent Seller — the living version, where your priced products become a real catalog with tracked costs and your materials become inventory that draws down as you buy and make.
Try the free calculator first
Want a taste before you buy? The free Handmade Pricing Calculator prices one product right in your browser — materials, packaging, labor, overhead, and a marketplace fee into a suggested retail price and your real profit. The full workbook prices your whole shop: every product, a markup-vs-margin Pricing Lab, per-channel fees, wholesale, a materials price book, and the catalog that shows which listings actually earn.
A pricing framework, not financial advice. Every figure in the examples is illustrative — material prices, wages, overhead, and marketplace fees vary by craft, region, supplier, and channel, so you enter your own. Sales tax, business registration, and your channel’s current fees are yours to verify.
Instant digital download. Nothing ships — you get the workbook and guides the moment you buy, yours to use forever.
