Treat the shop and the printer as separate cost layers
Your production cost exists before a listing is published: material, machine occupancy, power, maintenance, hands-on labor, packaging, and expected retry cost. Etsy and payment-related charges are selling costs applied to revenue. Keeping those groups separate makes the estimate easier to update when either your workshop or the platform changes.
Do not rely on a fee percentage copied from an old article. The charges that apply can depend on country, currency, advertising attribution, listing activity, shipping, taxes, and the services your account uses. Open your current Etsy payment account or official fee documentation, identify both percentage-based and fixed per-order charges, and enter those real values into LayerMargin.
A repeatable Etsy pricing workflow
- Export slicer facts. Record total grams and hours for the production batch, including support and purge waste.
- Build production cost. Add electricity, wear, maintenance, labor, packaging, licenses, inserts, and any other batch expense.
- Add failure risk. Use your measured retry history when available. New or delicate products deserve a different assumption than a proven production file.
- Enter current shop fees. Combine only percentage charges that apply to revenue in the percentage field. Put the fixed per-order amount in the fixed-fee field.
- Select target margin. This is the share of final revenue left as profit after the modeled costs and fees.
- Test the market. Compare the sustainable result with comparable products, then improve the offer or process if the gap is too wide.
LayerMargin does not claim a universal “Etsy fee.” Enter the effective charges that apply to your account and transaction. Recheck them when Etsy changes terms or when you enable a new service.
Remember costs that hide outside the slicer
Product photography, design licenses, replacement shipments, labels, boxes, tissue, inserts, assembly hardware, and customer-service time can outweigh filament on small products. Recurring overhead such as software and workspace costs may be added through an hourly maintenance/overhead allowance or allocated as another batch cost, as long as you apply the method consistently.
If the buyer pays shipping separately, do not automatically count the full shipping charge as profit: postage, packing material, insurance, and shipping-related selling fees may consume it. If you advertise “free shipping,” the product price must absorb those costs.
Use contribution margin to judge products
Once the order price is known, subtract selling fees and direct production cost. What remains is the expected profit contribution modeled for that order. Compare that amount with the printer hours consumed, not just the percentage margin. A high-margin miniature may contribute fewer dollars per machine hour than a lower-margin batch.
Review actual orders
After a job ships, compare estimated grams, print hours, labor, failures, and fees with what happened. Repeated misses are a signal to update the profile, redesign the part, change orientation, adjust batch size, or raise the price. Pricing becomes reliable when it is a feedback loop rather than a one-time guess.