Pricing Embroidery Per Stitch — How to Do It Right

Last updated: April 2026

As a small embroidery business owner, one of the first things you realise is that you’re not just a crafter — you’re a manufacturer. And manufacturers need to know their costs.

Pricing embroidery per stitch sounds technical, but once you break it down it’s just a few numbers added together. Get it right and you’ll stop second-guessing every quote. Get it wrong and you’ll be busy but broke — running the machine all day while your profit quietly vanishes.

This guide walks through the two main pricing approaches, a real worked example, and what to track to make sure every stitch is covered.

Two approaches to embroidery pricing

The embroidery industry uses two general methods. Most shops use a mix of both depending on the job type.

Per stitch pricing

You charge based on the total number of stitches in the design. The rate varies depending on complexity, placement, and whether you’re doing a one-off or a bulk run.

Per stitch pricing is flexible and fair for custom work. It automatically adjusts for larger, more complex designs without requiring you to re-quote everything from scratch.

Fixed unit pricing

You set a flat price per item. This works well for repeat orders — if you’re embroidering the same 5,000-stitch logo on 200 polo shirts, it’s faster to say “$12 per shirt” than to calculate stitch costs every time.

Fixed unit pricing still needs to be built from a real per-stitch cost. The flat rate should be derived from your actual costs, not just what competitors charge.

How to calculate your thread count

The thread count is the number of stitches per inch of design width. It tells you how dense the embroidery is.

To calculate it: divide the total number of stitches by the width of your design in inches.

For example, 2,150 stitches across a 2-inch wide design gives you a thread count of 1,075 stitches per inch (2,150 ÷ 2 = 1,075).

Higher thread counts mean more thread used, longer run times, and more needle wear — all of which push your cost up. This is especially relevant for badges, caps, and dense left-chest logos.

Evaluating design complexity

Complexity is the other big cost driver. A simple two-colour logo takes far less time than a photorealistic design with fine shading and seven thread changes.

When you’re quoting a new design, run through these checks:

• How many colours does the design use?
• Are there fine outlines, small text, or detailed gradients?
• Does the job require specialty stitches (satin, fill, running, French knots)?
• How large is the design, and where does it sit on the garment?
• Is the base fabric stretchy, thick, or otherwise tricky to stabilise?

Each of these adds time. And your time has a cost.

Material costs — the full picture

This is where a lot of embroidery businesses undercharge. They account for thread, forget the rest.

Here’s what your material cost should include:

Thread Thread weight matters. 40wt polyester is the standard, but metallic threads, specialty silk, or heavier 30wt threads cost more per metre and break more often (which adds machine downtime). A typical 5,000-stitch design uses roughly 50–80 metres of thread, depending on density.

Backing and stabiliser Every job needs stabiliser. Cut-away backing (for stretch fabrics) costs more than tear-away. Topping film — used to keep stitches from sinking into fleece or terry cloth — is another material to cost in. Don’t leave these off because they’re cheap. They add up across a large run.

Needles Machine needles dull over time. Dense designs, metallic threads, and heavy fabrics accelerate wear. A reasonable rule of thumb is one needle per 10–12 hours of run time, though metallic thread halves that life expectancy. Calculate a per-unit needle cost based on your needle price and average lifespan.

Garments or blanks If you’re supplying the item (polo shirts, caps, bags), this is usually your biggest material cost. Track the cost per blank separately from your embroidery cost so you know your true margin on supplied-goods jobs vs. decorating-only jobs.

Packaging and delivery materials Tissue paper, poly bags, hangtags, boxes. Small per unit but real.

Set up a proper materials list for each job type. A spreadsheet can work for a handful of products — once you’re running multiple designs across different garments and fabrics, a dedicated tool like Craftybase handles the recipe-style tracking automatically and keeps your material costs updated in real time.

Labor and overhead

Material costs don’t tell the whole story. Labor and overhead are the two costs that most embroidery businesses either underestimate or skip entirely.

Labor Your time — or your staff’s time — has a cost. Set an hourly rate you’d want to earn (or what you pay employees), then estimate run time per item based on stitch count and machine speed. Don’t forget hoop-up time, thread changes, trimming, and quality checks. These off-machine minutes add up fast.

Overhead Overhead covers the fixed costs of keeping the doors open: machine lease or depreciation, electricity, software subscriptions, insurance, workspace costs. Divide your monthly overhead by the number of items you produce to get a per-unit overhead figure.

It feels tedious to calculate. But skipping it means someone else — your business — is absorbing the cost silently.

Worked example — a 5,000-stitch logo

Let’s put real numbers to this. Say you’re embroidering a company logo on a polo shirt. The design has 5,000 stitches, two colours, moderate complexity.

Stitch cost At a base rate of $0.01 per stitch: 5,000 × $0.01 = $50.00

Material cost breakdown

• Thread (70m at $0.003/m): $0.21
• Tear-away stabiliser (one 4” square cut): $0.08
• Needle allocation ($0.50/needle ÷ 50 units per needle life): $0.01
• Total materials: $0.30

Garment (customer-supplied in this example) Not applicable — customer is providing their own shirts.

Labor Run time at 600 stitches/minute: ~8 minutes. Hoop-up and trim: ~4 minutes. Total 12 minutes at $25/hour = $5.00

Overhead allocation Monthly overhead of $500 across 200 units: $2.50 per unit

Total cost to produce: $57.80

Apply your target margin. If you want 40% profit margin, your selling price needs to be around $96. If the market rate in your area for a 5,000-stitch logo is $8–12 (decoration only), you may need to re-examine your overhead load or hourly rate — not just match the market rate without knowing your numbers.

This is the point where knowing your real costs protects you. If you’re pricing at $9 because that’s what the competitor down the road charges, and your actual cost is $57.80 on a decorated-only job… something is very wrong.

Researching competition pricing

Once you know your floor (what it costs you), check what others are charging in your market. Competition research tells you what customers expect to pay — it should inform your positioning, not replace your cost calculation.

Look at:

• Local embroidery shops and online services offering similar work
• Pricing for comparable stitch counts and garment types
• Volume discounts your competitors offer (and what threshold they kick in at)

The goal isn’t to match the cheapest option. It’s to find a price that covers your costs, earns you a fair return, and sits within the range customers consider reasonable. If your costs are genuinely higher than the market supports, that’s useful information — it means you need to reduce costs, not cut your margin.

Competition research shouldn’t be your only input

Matching competitors’ prices without knowing your costs is one of the most common pricing mistakes in the embroidery industry. The problem: you don’t know what their costs look like. A shop running high-speed six-head commercial machines has a very different cost structure from a solo operator with a single-head home machine. Their “market price” may be profitable for them and loss-making for you.

Use competition research as a sanity check. Use your cost calculation as the foundation.

Using Craftybase to track embroidery costs

Craftybase is built for small-batch manufacturers — including embroidery businesses — who need accurate cost tracking without a full accounting team.

You set up your materials (thread, stabiliser, backing types, blanks) with their current costs. Then you build a recipe for each design or job type, specifying how much of each material goes into one unit. Craftybase automatically calculates your cost per stitch, cost per unit, and COGS across your product range — and updates the calculations whenever your material costs change.

When your thread supplier puts prices up, you don’t have to manually recalculate every product. The change flows through automatically.

It also connects to Etsy, Shopify, and other sales channels, so your orders import directly and your inventory adjusts in real time. Tax time becomes a report you pull rather than a spreadsheet you rebuild from scratch.

Start a free 14-day trial — no credit card required.

Frequently Asked Questions

Pricing embroidery accurately comes down to knowing your numbers — stitch count, materials, time, and overhead — and building that into every quote you send. The work is upfront. But once you have a working cost model, pricing new jobs becomes fast and confident.

If you’re tired of second-guessing your margins, Craftybase gives you a way to track all of it in one place — from raw materials through to finished product cost, connected to where you sell. Try it free for 14 days.