The tool prices the same product across Printful, Printify and Gelato, with platform fees, shipping, ads and reprints included, and every figure linked to its source.
New York, NY (PRUnderground) October 22nd, 2026
POD Platform Review, the independent site that reviews and compares print-on-demand platforms, today launched the Print on Demand Profit Calculator, a free tool that shows what a print-on-demand product actually earns once every cost is counted. Sellers pick a product, a supplier, a print technique and a sales channel, and the calculator returns monthly profit, profit per order and per unit, margin, break-even price and the retail price needed to hit a target margin. Alongside it sits a side-by-side comparison of the same product from Printful, Printify and Gelato at an identical retail price, platform and region, so the only variable is the supplier.
Unlike most profit calculators, which stop at base product cost, this one models the full cost stack: supplier shipping for the first and each additional item, marketplace listing and transaction fees, payment processing, Etsy Offsite Ads, advertising, reprints and losses, currency conversion, tax-inclusive pricing, and paid supplier subscription tiers. Common products come pre-filled with stored costs; for anything else, sellers enter the base price from each supplier and every other cost still applies. Every price and fee was checked on September 22, 2026, is re-checked monthly, and links to the published page it came from.
Why most profit calculators get it wrong
Base product cost is only one variable. Platform fees, shipping, advertising and reprints decide whether a product makes money, and most calculators leave them out. The version most sellers run in their head, base cost plus shipping plus the marketplace transaction fee, makes a $24.99 t-shirt look like a 38.2% margin. Add the listing fee, payment processing, Offsite Ads, the cost of winning the order and the share of orders that have to be made twice, and the margin lands at 22.8%. At a hundred orders a month that gap is $386, the difference between a side income and a hobby.
The second error is structural. Several real costs are charged once per order no matter how many items it contains: the listing fee, the fixed part of payment processing, first-item shipping and the advertising that won the customer. A calculator that works per unit cannot represent the gap between first-item and additional-item shipping, which POD Platform Review found to be the single biggest source of error in the calculators it checked. Ten orders of one item and two orders of five are the same units but not the same business; on the tool's own defaults the second version earns roughly sixty percent more profit on identical revenue.
The calculator is also explicit about what it does not model, from tiered volume pricing and cross-border duties to chargebacks and the seller's own time, on the grounds that a calculator that hides its limits is worse than no calculator.
"The most common reason a product that worked on a spreadsheet loses money in practice is five lines the spreadsheet never had," said Marian, co-founder at POD Platform Review. "Listing fees, processing, ads, reprints, Offsite Ads. None of them is large on its own. Together they take a third of what looked like profit. We built this so sellers see that before they order samples, not after."
How it works
The calculator takes a seller's setup in four groups of inputs and returns one monthly profit figure with the full cost stack beneath it.
Product and supplier. Pick a pre-filled product, or add your own with the base price from each supplier, then choose Printful, Printify or Gelato, the print technique, extra print placements and whether you pay for a subscription tier.
Selling price and sales channel. Retail price, units per order, orders per month, average discount and whether shipping is free and absorbed into the price; then the platform (Etsy, Shopify or your own site), seller country, the share of orders arriving through Etsy Offsite Ads and whether the price includes VAT or sales tax.
Shipping and fulfillment. Supplier shipping for the first item and each extra item, using the stored rate or your own.
Reality check. Monthly ad budget or ad cost per order, reprints and losses as a share of orders, and currency conversion.
Profit is worked out per order and then divided down to per unit, so costs charged once per order are counted once. Break-even and target price are solved numerically rather than with a formula, so they stay correct when a platform changes the shape of its fees rather than just the percentage. A sensitivity table shows which inputs move profit most, and a subscription check tells the seller at what monthly volume a paid supplier tier pays for itself.
The worked example on the page: a Bella + Canvas 3001 t-shirt, the benchmark blank in the site's comparison of print-on-demand shirt suppliers, from Printify, sold on Etsy in the United States at $24.99 with free shipping, one unit per order and no discount, earns $5.69 per order, a 22.8% margin, with a break-even price of $18.48. The same product under identical assumptions from Printful earns $2.81 per order (11.2%) and from Gelato $0.37 (1.5%). The tool highlights the lowest-cost supplier for that scenario but states that the highlight is not a verdict; a different product, region, technique or volume can change the answer. Sellers weighing the channel itself can pair the calculator with the site's guide to the best print-on-demand platforms for Etsy, which walks through the same fee structure on a worked sweatshirt example.
Every scenario can be shared by link. Supplier costs and shipping use each supplier's lowest published rate, so the profit shown is a best case rather than an average, and the page says so.
About POD Platform Review
POD Platform Review reviews and compares print-on-demand platforms side by side, by product, sales channel and region. The team places real orders, compares production times against what is advertised and checks print quality. The site publishes reviews, comparisons, alternatives, best-pick guides, and free tools.
Media contact
Marian, co-founder at POD Platform Review
POD Platform Review
contact@podplatformreview.com
