One Cost Model for Candles, Stickers and Prints: Pricing Handmade Goods Past the Fees

Plenty of makers sell more than one kind of thing. A candle maker adds a sticker sheet of their logo, a 3D-printing shop starts pouring resin miniatures, and a stall at the weekend market ends up holding four product lines priced four different ways. One gets “materials times three”, another gets whatever the shop down the road charges, and the third gets a number that felt right in March. A table like that has no single idea of what anything costs, so it’s hard to tell which line actually pays.

The fix is to price every craft with the same model. The inputs differ (grams of wax, sheets of vinyl, hours of printer time) but the structure doesn’t. Every handmade item has a unit cost, a failure rate, a labour share, and then two layers most cost calculators leave out: the marketplace’s cut, which is charged on your price rather than your cost, and the wholesale tier, which has to leave room for a shop to double your number. This post builds that model once and runs four products through it.

The unit cost has the same five lines in every craft

Whatever you make, the cost of one sellable unit breaks down like this:

Line	Candle	Sticker	FDM print	Resin print
Materials per unit	wax, fragrance oil, vessel, wick, label	vinyl or sticker paper, ink, laminate	filament	resin, including supports
Consumables	wick stickers, pitcher wear, test burns	blade and mat wear	nozzles, build plate surface	IPA, gloves, FEP film
Machine time	(usually none)	cutter wear	printer amortisation, electricity	printer amortisation
Labour	pouring, trimming, labelling	cutting, weeding, sorting	removal, support clean-up, sanding	washing, curing, support removal
Failure buffer	sinkholes, frosting, wet spots	miscuts, misprints	failed prints	failed prints, cracked parts

The 3D print pricing guide already works through the two lines people most often skip, which are machine amortisation (printer cost ÷ lifetime hours × print hours) and the failure buffer (divide the subtotal by 1 − failure rate so good units carry the bad ones). Neither is specific to printing. A candle batch with a 5% reject rate needs the same ÷ 0.95 as a printer that fails one job in twenty. A vinyl cutter wears out like any other machine, even if the blade is the only part you replace.

Labour is the line that changes most between crafts, because it’s usually done in batches. You pour twelve candles in one session and cut a whole sheet of stickers in one pass. Divide the session’s hands-on time by the units it produced, then multiply by your hourly rate. Don’t count time when nothing needs you, like wax curing or a printer running overnight. That’s the same rule the 3D Print Total Cost Estimator uses: it charges your labour rate only on post-processing minutes, never on print hours.

Four products, one cost-to-make

Here are four items run through the same five lines, with each tool doing the part it actually covers.

A 14 oz coconut-soy candle. The Candle Making Calculator handles quantities, not money, and the candle wax and fragrance guide explains the headspace and fragrance-load maths behind it. For an 80 mm × 100 mm jar with 15 mm of headspace, coconut-soy wax (the tool uses 0.88 g/mL) and a 9% fragrance load, it gives 376.0 g of wax and 33.8 g of fragrance oil per candle, or 4,511.8 g of wax for a batch of 12. You attach the prices yourself. Wax at $7.50/kg comes to $2.82, and fragrance oil at $28 per pound (453.6 g) comes to $2.09. Add a $2.60 jar with lid, a $0.25 wick and a $0.15 label, and materials total $7.91. Allow $0.20 of consumables. If the batch takes 2.5 hands-on hours at $22/hour, labour is $55 ÷ 12 = $4.58 a candle. The subtotal is $12.69, and dividing by 0.95 for a 5% reject rate gives a cost to make of $13.36.

Worth noticing: the jar and the fragrance oil each cost more than the wax. Pricing candles from wax weight alone has the same flaw as pricing prints from filament weight alone.

A 2.5-inch die-cut sticker. In the Sticker / Decal / Vinyl Size & Cost Calculator, a 750 × 750 px design at 300 DPI on an 8.5 × 11 inch sheet, with 2 mm bleed and 2 mm margin, makes a 2.81-inch cell and a 3 × 3 grid, so 9 stickers per sheet. The sticker sizing guide shows why bleed and margin cost so much yield. Count the whole sheet cost here, including paper, ink and laminate. At $1.85 a sheet, that’s $0.206 per sticker. The tool stops at material cost times a markup, so labour has to be added by hand. Six minutes of cutting and weeding per sheet at $22/hour is $2.20 ÷ 9 = $0.244 per sticker. Add $0.02 of blade and mat wear and a 3% miscut rate, and the cost to make is $0.49. Labour is more than the material.

A 45 g PLA desk organiser. All of this one goes in the estimator: 45 g at $22/kg, 3.2 hours, 150 W at $0.30/kWh, an $800 printer over 6,000 hours, a 6% failure rate, and 6 minutes of finishing at $25/hour. It returns filament $0.99, electricity $0.14, machine wear $0.43 and labour $2.50, for a subtotal of $4.06. The failure buffer brings the cost to make to $4.32.

A resin miniature. The Resin Print Volume & Cost Calculator takes an 18 mL model with a 35% support buffer in Siraya Fast (1.06 g/mL) from a $42, 1,000 mL bottle. It returns 24.3 mL, 25.8 g, $1.02 of resin and 41 prints per bottle. That’s the material line only, as the resin cost guide also points out. Add $0.40 for IPA, gloves and FEP wear, and $0.04 of machine time (a $350 printer over 3,000 hours, with eight minis sharing a 2.5-hour plate). Fifteen minutes of support removal, washing and curing at $25/hour adds $6.25. Resin prints fail more often than FDM ones, so use 10%, which gives a cost to make of $8.56.

If you’d rather have the estimator’s line-by-line breakdown for resin too, it accepts resin if you treat it like filament. Enter the print’s weight in grams and convert the bottle price to a per-kilogram figure ($42 ÷ 1.06 kg = $39.62/kg). The 25.8 g mini then costs $1.02 of material, the same answer the resin tool gave. The estimator doesn’t know about IPA or gloves, though, so fold those into the post-processing time or add them separately.

Fees come off the price, so you can’t just add them to the cost

Every pricing rule so far, whether it’s cost × 1.5, the estimator’s markup or the sticker tool’s 3×, multiplies your cost. Marketplace fees don’t work that way. They’re a percentage of what the buyer pays, plus a few fixed charges. If you add a 50% markup and then let Etsy take its share, you keep less than 50%.

Etsy’s fee schedule changes from time to time and differs by country, so check its current fee page before relying on these numbers. Its widely reported US structure in 2026 is a 6.5% transaction fee on the item price plus shipping and gift wrap, payment processing of 3% + $0.25 per order, and a $0.20 listing fee each time a listing is created, renewed or sells. Offsite Ads add 12% to 15% on sales they’re credited with, capped at $100 per order, and they’re mandatory once a shop passes $10,000 a year in sales. Other marketplaces and local payment processors use the same structure with different numbers: a percentage of the sale plus a fixed amount per transaction.

So the correct price is solved backwards:

price = (cost to make × (1 + markup) + fixed fees) ÷ (1 − percentage fees)

With US Etsy numbers and no ads, percentage fees are 0.065 + 0.03 = 0.095 and fixed fees are $0.45 for a single-item order. Here are the four products at a 50% markup:

Product	Cost to make	Naive price (cost × 1.5)	Profit at the naive price	Fee-correct price	With a 15% Offsite Ads sale
Candle	$13.36	$20.04	$4.33	$22.64	$27.14
Sticker (single)	$0.49	$0.73	−$0.28	$1.30	$1.56
FDM organiser	$4.32	$6.48	$1.09	$7.66	$9.18
Resin mini	$8.56	$12.84	$2.61	$14.69	$17.61

The naive price on the candle keeps $4.33 instead of the $6.68 you meant to earn, because about a third of your intended profit goes in fees. On the single sticker the naive price loses money outright. The fixed $0.45 is nearly the sticker’s whole cost.

That sticker row is the general lesson about fixed per-order costs. Packaging belongs with them too, since a rigid mailer and backing card cost the same whether one sticker goes in or ten. Put $0.40 of packaging on a single sticker and the fee-correct price is $1.96. Sell a pack of five with one mailer and one set of fixed fees, and the cost is 5 × $0.49 + $0.40 = $2.85, which the same formula turns into $5.22, or $1.04 a sticker. Cheap items should be sold in bundles because the per-order costs only get paid once.

One more detail: because the 6.5% applies to shipping as well, a shipping charge set exactly at the postage cost loses 9.5% before the carrier is paid. Either add the fee percentage to your shipping charge or build shipping into the item price.

Markup is not margin, and the difference matters at wholesale

These two words get swapped all the time. Markup is profit as a share of cost. Margin is profit as a share of price. The estimator’s “markup on cost” field set to 40% turns a $4.32 cost into $6.05. That’s a 40% markup, but only a 28.6% gross margin (1.73 ÷ 6.05). The estimator labels the field as a markup for that reason. A 100% markup is a 50% margin. The numbers differ, and a shop owner asking for “50 points of margin” means half the retail price, not cost plus 50%.

The wholesale tier has to work before you set retail

Shops that stock handmade goods usually buy at wholesale, roughly half of the suggested retail price. That 2× convention is often called keystone pricing. Consignment works differently: the shop pays you only when something sells and keeps a cut, often 30% to 40%. The rule of thumb for craft businesses chains the two together:

wholesale ≥ cost to make × (1 + your markup)
retail = wholesale × 2

The order matters. If wholesale has to be profitable, it sets the floor for retail, not the other way round. Stockists also expect you not to undercut them online, so your Etsy price ends up close to that retail figure. Using a 50% markup at wholesale:

Product	Wholesale floor	Implied retail	Online fee-correct floor
Candle	$20.04	$40.08	$22.64
Sticker (single)	$0.73	$1.46	$1.30
FDM organiser	$6.48	$12.96	$7.66
Resin mini	$12.84	$25.68	$14.69

Now compare each implied retail with what similar items actually sell for. Stickers have plenty of room: handmade stickers commonly sell well above $1.46 each, so the model leaves lots of space for wholesale. The candle is tighter. If comparable 14 oz candles in your market sell for $30 to $38, a $40 retail price won’t sell. You have three ways out: reduce cost (bigger batches cut the $4.58 labour share fastest, and a cheaper jar is the next lever), accept a thinner wholesale markup, or sell that candle direct only and put a smaller, cheaper-to-make product in shops instead.

These are business rules of thumb, not accounting or tax advice. Fees, sales tax and income tax rules depend on where you sell and where you live, so check the specifics for your own shop.

Run your own numbers through the tools

Start with the tool for whatever you make: the Candle Making Calculator for wax and fragrance quantities, the Sticker / Decal / Vinyl Size & Cost Calculator for sheet yield and material cost, the Resin Print Volume & Cost Calculator for resin and supports. Then use the 3D Print Total Cost Estimator, or the same five lines by hand, to get a cost to make. The fee gross-up and the wholesale check aren’t built into any of the tools, so do those last with the two formulas above, before you set a price you’ll have to stick with.