If you came to embroidery from screen printing, the instinct is to price it by colors — that's the lever you know. Drop it. Embroidery doesn't care much about colors. It cares about stitch count, because stitch count is run time, and run time is what the machine actually costs you.
An embroidery machine bills you in minutes. A design with 12,000 stitches sits on the head roughly twice as long as one with 6,000, so it ties up the machine — and your operator's attention — twice as long. Swapping a thread color takes a few seconds; stitching takes minutes. So the number that drives your cost is stitches, and everything else is a rounding error by comparison.
Stitch count, not colors
Your digitizer gives you the stitch count for every design — it's right there in the stitch file. That one number tells you which price tier the job lands in. Instead of a colors × quantity grid like screen printing, an embroidery chart is stitch-tier × quantity: a few bands of stitch count (say, under 5,000, 5–10K, 10–15K, 15K and up) down the side, quantity breaks across the top.
Colors barely move the price because they barely move the machine. A left-chest logo in one thread color and the same logo in five colors run for nearly the same time if they're the same stitch count — the head just picks up a different cone between color blocks. So don't build a color surcharge into embroidery the way you would for screens. Build stitch tiers, get the count from your digitizer, and drop the job in the right band.
Get the stitch count first
Before you quote embroidery, have the design digitized (or at least estimated) so you know the stitch count. Quoting embroidery without it is like quoting screen print without knowing the color count — you're guessing at the one input that sets the price.
The grid below prices embroidery the right way: stitch tiers down the side, quantities across the top, overhead spread across every piece, and margin applied on top. Set your numbers and watch it fill in — it's the same shape as the embroidery chart InkTracker keeps for you.
| Stitches \ Qty | 12 | 24 | 48 | 72 | 144 |
|---|
–
+ one-time digitizing \u2248 $50 per new design \u2014 charge it once, reuse the file forever.
Don't forget digitizing
There's one cost embroidery has that screen printing doesn't: digitizing. Before the machine can stitch a logo, someone has to "punch" the artwork into a stitch file — mapping every stitch, direction, and density. It's skilled work, and it's a one-time cost per design, usually somewhere around $40–75 depending on complexity.
The key is that it's one-time. You pay to digitize a logo once, and then you own the stitch file forever — every reorder of that design runs off the same file at no extra digitizing cost. So charge the digitizing fee once, on the first order for a new design, and don't bury it in the per-piece price where it either scares off the first order or vanishes on the reorders. Bill it as its own line, reuse the file, and both you and the customer come out ahead.
Margin isn't markup here either
The same margin lesson from screen printing carries straight over: every cell in your embroidery chart should be price = cost ÷ (1 − margin), not cost plus a markup percentage. A "50% markup" on a $6 per-piece cost is $9 — a 33% margin, not 50%. If you want to actually keep half, it's 6 ÷ (1 − 0.50) = $12. Build the grid on margin so the profit you decided on is the profit you get, on every piece, at every stitch tier.
Set it once
Just like the screen-print chart, the embroidery chart is something you build once and then stop thinking about. Set your stitch tiers, your quantity breaks, your overhead-per-piece, and your margin, and every embroidery quote reads the right cell.
In InkTracker, the embroidery chart lives right next to the screen-print one — same idea, stitch tiers instead of colors. You configure it once, and every quote that involves a stitched logo pulls its price from that grid and adds the one-time digitizing fee when it's a new design. Set your rates the way the price-chart post lays out, and the app runs the same disciplined math on embroidery that it runs on screen printing — automatically, on every quote.
Common questions
- What sets the price on an embroidery job?
- Stitch count. It's the embroidery equivalent of color count on a screen print — the one input that drives the number. Get the design digitized (or at least estimated) so you know the stitch count before you quote. Quote without it and you're guessing at the thing that sets the price.
- Should I charge for digitizing?
- Yes, once per design. Digitizing a new logo runs around $50 of one-time work; charge it on the first order and reuse the file forever after. Don't bury it in the per-piece price — it's a one-time line, not a running cost.