Most people who search for a teespring profit calculator are not really asking about arithmetic. They have a design, or an idea for one, and they want to know whether putting it on a shirt is worth an evening. A calculator feels like the responsible first step, and it is a reasonable one. It just answers a narrower question than the one being asked.
What a Teespring profit calculator actually calculates
Teespring, which now trades as Spring, works on a base cost. The platform names a price that covers the blank shirt and the printing, you choose a retail price above it, and the gap is your profit per sale. A calculator for that model is a subtraction with a slider: move the retail price, watch the profit per shirt move with it, then multiply by however many shirts you think you will sell.
The subtraction is correct. The base cost is real, the retail price is yours to set, and the difference is what you are paid. If every sale happened on that one platform and nothing else touched the order, the calculator would be finished.
The trouble is that the multiplication at the end is where nearly all of the answer lives, and the calculator contributes nothing to it. Before getting to that, though, the subtraction itself is shorter than it looks once a design sells anywhere else.
The costs one sale carries that a simple calculator leaves out
Here is a real order of ours, a t-shirt sold on Etsy, line by line.
- The buyer paid $17.99 for the shirt and $5.99 for shipping, $23.98 in total.
- Printing the shirt cost $10.87.
- Posting it cost $4.75.
- Etsy's transaction and processing fees came to $2.73, calculated on the whole $23.98, shipping included.
That leaves $5.63. A calculator would have stopped there, and on most orders so would we. This one had one more line.
Etsy advertises its sellers' listings on other websites, and when a buyer arrives through one of those ads it charges an Offsite Ads fee on the order: 15% of the order total until a shop has made $10,000 in a twelve-month period, and 12% from then on. Smaller shops can opt out, and a shop that stays in does not get to choose which orders the fee lands on. On this order it was $3.60, and the profit fell from $5.63 to $2.03. Nine of our Etsy orders have carried it so far, at between $2.81 and $3.76 each.
The transaction fee being charged on shipping is a story of its own, and we checked ours to the cent. Two smaller things belong on the same list. Base costs are usually quoted for the standard sizes and larger sizes cost more to print, so a single base price overstates the margin on every 2XL. And some orders go wrong at the printer or in the post, and somebody pays for the replacement.
The number the calculator asks you to make up
Every profit calculator ends in a field for units sold. It is the most important number on the page and the only one nobody can give you, including the calculator. On a platform where you run your own storefront, it also assumes you will bring most of the buyers yourself.
Most designs sell very little. Plenty sell nothing at all, and that is true of good designs as well as weak ones, because being found is a separate problem from being well drawn. A design can sit for months before a marketplace's search starts showing it to anyone. Typing 100 a month into that box does not make it more likely. It only makes the total at the bottom larger.
Price has the same problem from the other side. A calculator lets you drag the retail price up and watch the profit per shirt rise while the units field sits still. In practice it does not sit still. A higher price earns more on each sale and makes each sale less likely, and the calculator has no way to tell you where that trade stops paying.
A better question to ask it: what does it cost if nothing sells?
Because the income side rests on a guess, the more useful thing to work out is the downside, which rests on facts you already have. Add up what a design costs you before anybody buys it:
- Listing fees. On Etsy that is $0.20 per listing, and $0.20 again every four months while it stays up.
- A sample, if you order one to check the print.
- Paid tools, mockups and ads, if you use them.
- Your time, which is the largest cost and the one no calculator has a field for.
Then divide by the profit on one sale to see how many sales it takes just to stand still. On the Etsy order above, an ordinary sale at $5.63 pays for about nine listings for a year. A sale that Offsite Ads picked up, at $2.03, pays for about three.
This sum is duller, and it is the one that tells you what you are risking. Where you hold no stock and pay nothing up front, most of those lines are zero. What remains is your time, and that is the honest price of finding out whether a design sells.
How the arithmetic works here
YourOtherJob lists the design, prints and ships each order, handles returns and answers the customer emails. On each sale, the real costs come out first: the blank, the printing, the shipping and the marketplace's fees, including Offsite Ads when Etsy charges it. What is left is profit, and the artist's share on our top tier is half of it. On the ordinary Etsy sale above that is $2.82. On the one Offsite Ads picked up it is about a dollar. On our own website, where no marketplace takes a cut, the same shirt pays the artist $4.85.
Those are small numbers, and we would rather you saw them now than found them later. What the arrangement changes is the downside. There is no stock, no print run and no sample to buy, we pay the listing fees for the first eight months, and after that a listing renews out of your earnings only if you switch that on. A design that never sells costs you the time you spent making it and nothing else. Every line of the per-channel breakdown is on the payout example page.
If that sounds like a fair way to find out whether your designs sell, you can create a free account and upload one.