Promo Quote & Margin Calculator
Cost in, sell price out. Or a client budget in, and the margin it leaves you.
Most blown quotes are not sourcing mistakes. They are a missing line: the freight nobody added, the setup fee buried in the supplier PDF, the rush charge that got quoted at cost.
This is the whole quote on one screen. Fill in what the order actually costs you, set your margin, and get the sell price. Flip it around when a client leads with a budget and you need to know in ten seconds whether the number works.
Size the quote
Every line that belongs in a promo quote, in one place. Flip to reverse mode when the client leads with a budget.
The order
Your net cost from the supplier.
Run charges only. Screens and digitizing go in setup below.
One-time and pass-through
Screens, digitizing, plates, dies, proofs.
What the rush actually costs you. Selling it at cost means doing the hard version for free.
Your margin
$2,604.17 for the order
40 percent margin
$0.70 of it is fixed cost
The cost stack
Multiplying cost by 1.4 does not produce a 40 percent margin, it produces 28.6 percent. The gap between those two numbers on a year of quotes is not small.
Sell price = cost / (1 - margin). Rush premiums apply to cost before margin, so rush work stays as profitable as standard work. Nothing entered here is stored or transmitted.
How the math works
The cost stack
Product cost per piece plus decoration per piece gives your variable cost. Setup fees, freight, and any one-time charges are fixed for the order. Both have to clear margin or you are donating one of them.
Margin, not markup
Sell price = cost / (1 - margin). Multiplying cost by 1.4 gets you a 28.6 percent margin, not 40. This single mistake is the most common quiet profit leak in distributor quoting.
Rush work
Rush premiums apply to your cost, then get sold at margin like everything else. Passing a rush charge through at cost means you did the harder version of the job for less money.
Reverse mode
Given a client budget and your costs, the calculator solves for the margin that budget leaves. Use it before you say yes on the phone, not after you build the presentation.
The production version
Branded Quote Generator
Live, in daily useSupplier quote in, client-ready branded PDF out.
Proof: The quote conversion that used to eat a chunk of every deal now takes about a minute, and every document leaves on brand.
Questions, answered
That is your call and it varies by category, quantity, and how much work the order takes. The tool defaults to a round 40 percent so there is something in the field; change it to yours. Published industry margin guidance is not a substitute for knowing your own cost of doing business.
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Merch Wit Generator
Merch copy that sounds like a person wrote it, for whatever niche you sell into.
Want this running inside your systems?
A calculator is the demo. The version I run reads the order, applies the rates, and produces the client document without anyone opening a spreadsheet. The teardown is free and I will tell you plainly whether it is worth automating.