₵Craft Pricing Calculator

Free · no sign-up

Laser engraving pricing calculator — free, no sign-up

Machine minutes, material sheets, and the file setup nobody bills for. Put in what a piece actually consumes and get a price that pays for the machine as well as your time.

Materials

$6.37

Material sheet

$

A full sheet, divided by how many pieces you actually nest onto it. Yield depends entirely on your layout, so there is no sensible default — use your own. Counts as $2.75 on this piece.

Machine time

$

Electricity plus tube and lens wear — the machine only, NOT your time. Depreciation alone is about $0.02/min; working sellers use $0.05–0.10 all-in. Folding your labor in here is the mistake that makes a job look impossibly expensive.

$

Box, tissue, card, label.

Your time

$43.75
$

Include file setup and test burns, not just the time it was cutting.

Overhead and markup

$

Software, workspace, the machine paying itself off.

×2.5

Machine work carries a higher markup — you paid for the machine so you could charge for it. ×2.5 is a 60% profit margin — not 150%, which is the mistake that quietly costs makers money.

Charge at least

$140.30

$84.18 profit · 60% margin

Materials
$6.37
Your time
$43.75
Overhead
$6.00
What it costs you
$56.12

At this price your hours earn $102.34/hour after materials and overhead.

Currency changes the label only. Enter your costs in that currency. Taxes, shipping and selling fees are not included unless you add them to overhead.

Why this exists

Real comments from people asking this question. Every one links to the thread.

“A quick and dirty calculation is material cost x3. This allows for machine time, labour and profit.”
u/Sterek01, r/lasercutting
“Really it comes down to what your time is worth. Will you be tied to the machine for 11 hours or can you do other things while it runs?”
u/LaggyOne, r/lasercutting

What laser engraving pricing usually gets wrong

Pricing the burn, not the setup

Fourteen minutes of cutting can follow an hour of fixing someone's low-resolution logo. The setup is the work. Put it in the hours.

Treating the tube as free

A CO2 tube has a rated life in hours and then it needs replacing. It is a consumable with a per-minute cost, the same as the electricity, and pretending otherwise means the machine never pays for its own replacement.

Costing a piece against a whole sheet

If eight coasters come off one sheet, the piece owes an eighth of the sheet. The calculator asks for the sheet cost and the yield rather than making you do that division in your head every time.

Not pricing the failures in

Some burns scorch, some settings are wrong, some materials warp. If your markup does not carry the failures, your successful pieces are quietly paying for them out of your margin.

Questions

Shouldn't I just multiply my material cost by three?
Sometimes that lands in the same place, and when it does it is a fine shortcut. It breaks in two directions. On a small fast item where your time dwarfs the materials, a multiplier underpays you badly. On an expensive-material piece that was quick to make, it overcharges for the material and undercharges for the skill. The multiplier is really a guess at labour plus overhead plus profit rolled into one number — so put your real hours in here, see what price comes out, and then check what multiple of your materials that turns out to be. If the two agree, use whichever you prefer. If they disagree, the arithmetic is the one telling the truth.
What is a realistic cost per machine minute?
Add your machine's power draw at your electricity rate to the replacement cost of the tube divided by its rated hours, then convert to minutes. Most small-format setups land somewhere in the low tens of cents per minute, but yours depends on your machine and your tariff — the calculator takes your number rather than assuming one.
Should personalisation cost extra?
It costs you setup time, so yes. The cleanest way is a fixed personalisation fee that reflects the minutes it adds, rather than a vague premium the customer cannot understand.
How do I handle bulk orders?
Setup happens once and gets spread across the run, while material and machine time scale with quantity. Price one unit here, then reduce the labor hours per unit for the repeat, and you will see how far you can discount without losing money.

Price something else

Resin and epoxy calculatorWoodworking calculator