Print-on-demand margins when a post drives the order

A post lands, the merch link converts, and the first fulfillment invoice looks nothing like the spreadsheet. The gap is almost always shipping. Both Printful and Printify quote a product cost on their public pages, and both, in their own words, exclude shipping from it. Price off the catalog figure alone and you priced against a cost that was never the full cost.

The number on the pricing page is the base cost, not the margin

Printful’s pricing page defines what the catalog figure buys you. Under “Product base price” it lists three things: the blank product, one print or embroidery placement, and fulfillment. Under “Shipping and taxes,” it says shipping costs depend on product type, order size, and destination, and points to a separate page. The pricing page then gives the formula outright: “Your profit = Retail price minus Printful cost,” where the Printful cost is what you pay for the product, fulfillment, and shipping. Shipping sits inside the cost side of that equation and outside the catalog number.

Printify says the same with an asterisk. Its pricing page runs a profit calculator seeded with a Unisex Jersey Short Sleeve Tee at a fulfillment cost of $8.77. The footnote under it states that the production cost covers one item with one print and does not include shipping fees, taxes, and other possible storefront expenses. The page’s FAQ answer on earnings uses that same shirt: an $8.77 fulfillment cost sold at $19.99 “earns over $11 per sale.” By the page’s own footnote, sitting directly above, that $11 is a pre-shipping number. The vendor’s answer to the question creators actually ask and the vendor’s own disclaimer share a page, and only one of them is a margin.

So the base cost leaves out two variables: the shipping charge, billed per order and documented on a different page from the one you priced against, and anything moving with order volume.

Working a real example: one product, one order

The honest scope first. Printify publishes a base cost for a named shirt and no fetchable shipping rate for it. Printful publishes a shipping table for shirts and no base cost for a named shirt in any page it serves as text. So the base cost arithmetic below uses Printify’s figures, the shipping arithmetic uses Printful’s table, and no combined margin appears here, because no seller pays one vendor’s base cost and the other’s shipping.

The base cost half, from Printify. Take the shirt Printify put in its own calculator: base cost $8.77, retail $19.99, both published on printify.com/pricing/ and checked 7 September 2026. The arithmetic is $19.99 minus $8.77, leaving $11.22 before anything ships. That is the figure the vendor’s copy rounds to “over $11.”

The shipping half, from Printful. Its shipping page publishes a fixed rate table by product category, and the Shirts category explicitly covers t-shirts, tank tops, long sleeve shirts, and polo shirts. For a single product it lists $4.95 to the USA, $4.99 to Europe, $8.59 to Canada, and $12.49 worldwide. One order, one shirt, a $7.54 spread between the cheapest and dearest of those four.

Neither gap is a reporting shortcut. Printful’s pricing page describes what the base price includes but never quotes a figure for a specific shirt, and the catalog page that would carry one renders prices in the browser rather than in the served document. Printify’s shipping page publishes structure rather than rates: more than seventy print providers, each with a country and a “See rates” link, because the cost depends on which provider fulfils the product. Follow one and the table loads client side, the served page reading “Loading shipping rates” where the numbers should be. Those provider pages do serve one figure as text, a footnote identical on the SwiftPOD and Monster Digital entries putting an additional $3.50 charge on shipping to European countries.

What changes at higher order volume

Neither vendor’s pricing page documents a per-unit base cost that falls as order count rises. The assumption that it does is what makes creators tolerate a thin first month.

What both publish instead is a subscription discount. Printful’s Growth plan costs $24.99 a month, becomes free once you reach $12,000 a year in sales, and offers up to 33% off product pricing. Printify’s Premium is listed from $39 a month, or from $24.99 billed yearly, with up to 33% off new products and up to 20% off all products. Real discounts, but gated on a fee rather than on order count. Printful’s FAQ mentions that a bulk order earns a discount, without publishing a rate or threshold.

The volume effect documented with numbers sits on the shipping side, in Printful’s rate table. Every category there carries two columns, a single product rate and an additional product rate. For shirts to the USA that is $4.95 for the first and $2.20 for each one after. Two shirts in one order ship for $7.15 rather than $9.90, or $3.58 a shirt instead of $4.95. The base cost has not moved a cent. Per-unit shipping has fallen by more than a quarter.

That only fires when items travel together, and Printful’s page is specific about when they will not: it lists categories that always ship separately, including hats, mugs, posters, and stickers, and notes that an order split across fulfillment locations ships as separate parcels, at higher cost. So the practical volume break is not “more orders.” It is “more shirts in one order, from one facility.”

Where the margin actually gets thinner

The sequencing is what catches people. Retail price gets set when the product is created, before any traffic exists, against whichever number was on screen. That number is the base cost, because the base cost is what the product creator shows you. Shipping appears later, per order, on an invoice, once the orders are already priced.

Destination mix is the other half. A creator pricing merch pictures a domestic buyer. A post does not respect that; it converts wherever it lands. On Printful’s shirt table a worldwide order costs $12.49 against $4.95 to the USA, taking $7.54 more off the top than the order the pricing decision assumed. On Printify’s side the signal is the $3.50 European surcharge on the provider pages. Both are visible in advance, just on a different page from the one where the price gets set, which is the whole mechanism.

Checking your own numbers before the next post

  • Pull the base cost from the catalog, not the marketing page. Printful’s pricing page tells you what the base price covers but not what a given shirt costs. On Printify the base cost is per print provider, so open the provider you actually selected.
  • Pull the shipping rate from the shipping page, for your category and destination. On Printful that is printful.com/shipping, where shirts have their own category and a rate per region. On Printify it is the provider’s page under printify.com/shipping-rates/.
  • Write the subtraction out. Retail price, minus base cost, minus shipping for one unit to your most common destination. If that is not a number you would accept, the lever is the retail price, and the time to move it is before the post.
  • Run it again for an international buyer, using the worldwide row rather than the domestic one. That is the version a post is most likely to produce and least likely to have been priced for.
  • Redo it whenever the retail price, the product or provider, or your share of orders from outside your home region changes. Each moves the answer alone; the third moves without you touching anything.

Before you price the next drop

Prices and shipping rates here were verified on 7 September 2026 by fetching each vendor’s own page directly. No third-party review or aggregator was used. This is not Watchdog data and it is not on the re-verification schedule, so treat every number as a snapshot of that date and recheck before pricing against it. followedapp is published by the team behind RecurPost, and RecurPost is covered vendor #34 under the same rules as every other vendor.

FAQ

Does Printful or Printify charge less per unit at higher order volume?

Not on the base product cost, as far as either vendor’s own pages document. Both publish a subscription discount instead, Printful’s Growth plan at $24.99 a month and Printify’s Premium from $39 a month, neither triggered by order count. The documented volume effect is on shipping, in Printful’s published rate table: shirts to the USA cost $4.95 for the first and $2.20 for each one after in the same shipment.

Is the base product cost on the pricing page the same as the creator’s cost per sale?

No. The base cost is what you pay the fulfillment vendor for the blank and the print. Printful’s pricing page lists exactly that and puts shipping and taxes in a separate section on a separate page. Printify’s calculator footnote says the same. Your actual margin is retail price minus base cost minus the shipping charge for that order’s destination.

Sources

Back to Blog

Scroll to Top