Print Pricing Calculator

Print pricing has a quirk that trips up a lot of photographers: Base Lab Cost isn't charged flat across every print size, it's scaled by a Print Size multiplier (1× for a 5x7 up to 6× for a 24x36) before it's added to Framing Cost and Shipping Cost to form the Total Cost. That reflects reality — a lab charges meaningfully more to produce a large print than a small one, even from the same file, so pricing every size off the smallest print's cost would badly under-price your large-format work. The calculator then solves for a markup that makes your Target Profit Margin land as a percentage of the final Retail Price, not a percentage of cost — the formula is markup = totalCost × (margin / (1 − margin)), which is the standard "margin as percent of revenue" markup formula rather than a simple cost-plus percentage.

That distinction matters: a 60% margin on cost only requires a 60% markup, but a 60% margin on retail price requires a 150% markup on cost, because at that markup rate profit ends up being 60% of the higher retail price rather than 60% of the lower cost base. Margin Achieved is then recomputed independently from the resulting numbers as a check, and should match your Target Profit Margin input exactly (rounding aside) — if it doesn't, that's a sign of an edge case worth double-checking, such as entering a margin at or above 100%, which breaks the formula's denominator. Common mixups: forgetting that Framing Cost and Shipping Cost are not multiplied by the size factor (so oversized frames or heavy shipping on large prints need to be entered directly, not assumed to scale automatically), and confusing "margin" with "markup" when comparing this tool's output to a flat cost-plus pricing sheet from a lab or competitor.