How much should you charge for what you cast?
This guide was drafted with AI assistance.
Work out your true cost per piece first (materials, your time, and a share of the mold itself), then charge 2 to 2.5x that as a starting point for anything you sell direct. Selling anything you cast from a free Meshcast download needs a Pro plan, not a Free one, regardless of price.
Your true cost per piece
Almost every first price gets set from the material alone, a few cents of wax or a spoonful of resin, and that is why it is almost always too low. A real cost has three parts, and the first two are the ones people forget:
Easy to count
- Materials. Wax, resin, plaster, pigment, wick, packaging, the lot.
- The mold's own share. A mold is not free and it does not last forever. Its cost, split across how many casts it will realistically produce before it wears out, belongs in every single piece.
Easy to skip
- Your time. Mixing, pouring, demolding, trimming flash, finishing, packaging. Time a real batch once and you will not guess at this again.
- Failures. If one cast in ten does not survive demolding, the other nine are quietly paying for it whether you priced for that or not.
The casting cost calculator does the material and mold-amortisation half of this maths for you, material cost per cast, the mold's share of every unit, and your break-even point, for free with no upload. Add your own time on top of what it gives you, and that total is your real cost per piece, the number every price in this guide is built from.
Turning cost into a price
Why not just "cover costs"
A price that only covers materials and fees pays you nothing for the hours you put in, and it also drags down what every other maker in your category can reasonably charge, including you next season. Selling at a real margin is not greedy, it is what makes doing this again worth it.
Where to push higher
Hand-painting, personalisation (a name, a date), unusually fine detail your mold captures well, or a low print run all justify a markup above the 2.5x baseline. That work is real, even when it does not show up as a material line item.
Where 2x is already generous
A simple, fast-turnaround piece you can pour in volume (melt-and-pour soap bars, a plain votive candle) has thinner margins in the wider market. 2x is a normal, sustainable number there, not a discount.
Where you sell changes the maths
The 2 to 2.5x number is your base price. What a channel takes off the top still has to come out of it, or you are quietly selling below your real margin on that channel specifically.
| Channel | Typical cost on top | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Online marketplace (e.g. Etsy) | Roughly a small flat listing fee plus a percentage transaction fee and a payment-processing fee on every sale | Fees are charged on the total including shipping you collect, and rates change. Check the platform's current fee page before you price, don't assume last year's numbers. |
| Craft fair / market stall | A flat booth fee for the day or weekend, plus card-reader processing on card sales | The booth fee is fixed whether you sell one piece or fifty, so it needs volume to make sense, not a per-item markup alone. |
| Direct / local (friends, local shops, your own site) | Lowest overhead, sometimes card processing only | Easiest to underprice, since there is no marketplace fee reminding you to account for one. |
A worked example
Say your true cost per piece (materials, mold share, your time) comes out to $6. At 2.5x that is a $15 base price. Selling that on a marketplace with roughly 10% combined in listing, transaction and payment fees means you net about $13.50, still comfortably above cost. Sell the same piece at a market stall with a $30 booth fee for the day, and you need 4 sales just to clear the table before any of it is profit. Same product, same base price, two very different break-evens, which is why the channel has to be part of the maths, not an afterthought.
The rule almost everyone misses
Common pricing mistakes
Pricing off the material alone
Covered above, worth repeating: this is the single most common reason a handmade price is too low. The material is rarely more than a third of the real cost once your time is counted honestly.
Matching a mass-produced price
A factory-made version of something similar was never priced against a person's time the way yours has to be. Matching it means working for less than materials plus fees, before any of your own time counts.
Never re-checking the number
Material prices move. Revisit your cost per piece every few months, especially after a price rise on your main material, rather than discovering the gap a year later.
Pricing questions
Is cost x2 always the right markup?
It is a starting point, not a rule. 2 to 2.5x your true cost per piece is the widely used range for makers selling direct (a craft fair, your own site, a marketplace), because it is roughly what covers materials, your time and a real profit margin once fees come out.
Push it higher for anything hand-finished, painted or personalised, since that time is not in the material cost. Push it lower only if you are pricing to move volume on purpose, and know that going in.
What if my price is higher than what I see online?
Check what the comparison is actually made of first. A mass-produced import and a hand-poured, hand-finished piece are not the same product even if they look similar in a thumbnail, and pricing yours to match a factory good's price means working for less than materials plus fees, before your time counts at all.
If a genuinely comparable handmade piece is cheaper, that seller may be underpricing their own time, which is common and not a target to race to the bottom against.
Do I need to pay myself an hourly rate?
Yes, even a rough one. Time is the single most common thing left out of a handmade price, because it never shows up on a receipt the way a bag of wax does.
Time an actual batch once, from setup to packaging, divide by how many pieces it made, and multiply by whatever your hour is worth to you. Add that number to your materials cost before you mark anything up, or you are quietly working for free.
Should I price the same everywhere I sell?
No, because the costs behind each channel are different, not because the product changes. A marketplace listing carries fees a face-to-face craft-fair sale does not, and a booth carries a table fee a marketplace does not.
Price each channel to cover its own real costs on top of your base cost-plus number, rather than picking one number and hoping it works everywhere.
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