Printful Pricing

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Written by Matt Walsh | Reviewed and edited by Chris Singleton

In this detailed guide to Printful pricing, we take a look at the basic costs for Printful products, shipping and fulfillment services. We also discuss the fees for its many optional services like warehousing and custom branding, as well as how to access Printful discounts for your print-on-demand business.

But first…

What is Printful?

Printful is a print-on-demand (POD) service that allows you to create, print, and sell personalized merchandise through your own online store or an ecommerce marketplace like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy.

Unlike traditional printing companies that only print in bulk and require you to order a minimum number of products, Printful (like other POD companies) operates on a made-to-order model. This means that products are only printed when a customer places an order, and consequently, you can avoid any upfront costs.

Printful offers a wide range of printable products that can be customized with your unique designs. The Printful catalog contains over 330 customizable products including t-shirts, sweatshirts, posters, mugs, stationery, tech accessories and more.

Now, Printful doesn’t just print your products for you — it delivers them too. When the company prints a product for you, it then packages it up and ships it for you.

The process of selling with Printful generally involves three simple steps:

Once that’s done, you simply add your Printful product to one of its 23 ecommerce integrations and get selling.

So how much does Printful actually cost?

How much does Printful cost?

The good news is there are no monthly fees to use Printful. It is completely free to set up a Printful account, create custom products, integrate your account with an ecommerce platform and list products for sale.

You are however charged every time you sell a Printful product via your online store. There are three things that you’ll have to pay for, namely:

(I’ll discuss prices for specific products, different print techniques and shipping rates in much more detail shortly).

A key thing to note about the product and printing costs above is that all Printful products include one basic ‘print area’ as part of the standard price.

In the case of most clothing items, this means you can add one main ‘direct to garment’ (DTG) print design to your product as part of the standard product price. If you want to add additional print areas — i.e, a design on the back or sleeve of a t-shirt in addition to a main design on the front — you’ll face an additional fee for doing so.

As for shipping costs, you’ve got to remember that Printful charges you (not your customer) for shipping your product, so it’s important to factor these in when creating a product listing (so as to make sure that these shipping charges are covered by the price of your product listing).

In addition to these basic costs, Printful offers a range of optional services like customized packaging, warehousing and design services, all of which involve various fees depending on your requirements.

Let’s discuss all these costs in a bit more depth, starting with product and printing costs.

Product and printing costs

Printful used to have a reputation for being slightly more expensive than some of its print-on-demand competitors.

However, Printful recently implemented significant price cuts of 6% to 9% on much of its product catalog, which now puts its prices on a par with key competitors like Printify and SPOD (with Printful actually working out cheaper than them for a good range of popular items).

Printful’s starting prices for some popular POD products are outlined in the table below.

In terms of how Printful’s product prices stack up against some of its main competitors, Printful is, in general,

In some cases of course, we are not comparing like with like — most POD companies offer different base products (from different product manufacturers) and each platform comes with different unique features, tools and ecommerce integrations.

However, Printful generally betters other POD companies when it comes to product design functionality and overall features. So the fact that it is now also very competitive on product pricing creates a compelling overall case for using it to set up a POD business.

Costs for additional print areas

Now, in the case of the three clothing items mentioned above — the t-shirt, sweatshirt and unisex hoodie — these product prices include one standard DTG print.

However, one of the key benefits of Printful over competing POD apps is that it lets you add quite a few additional print areas to your products. These allow you to add extra design elements to your item.

Options on this front for standard apparel products include the ability to add print areas to their back, sleeves and neck areas.

If we use the $9.25 Gildan 64000 t-shirt above as an example, costs for adding additional DTG print areas to those locations are:

Most Printful apparel products allow you to add several extra DTG print areas, but it’s important to note that in some cases it is not possible to add both a back print and an outside label on the same item.

Embroidery pricing

In addition to printing your products with the DTG method, Printful also provides the option to add designs to your products by using embroidery.

There are over 80 products in Printful’s catalog that can be embroidered; these include hats, t-shirts, sweatshirts and hoodies.

In our t-shirt example, a finished embroidered Gildan t-shirt costs $11.95, adding $2.70 to the standard DTG print method price. In the case of the unisex sweatshirt, an embroidered version costs $22.25, which is $3.75 more than the DTG print technique.

If the design you are looking to use in an embroidery piece includes a wide variety of colors and shades, it is generally best to opt for Printful’s ‘unlimited color’ embroidery method. This costs an additional $3.50, but allows you to incorporate gradients and a much wider range of colors into your embroidery designs than the standard method.

Some example pricing for Printful embroidery items are as follows:

Some other embroidery fees you may face, depending on the product and design involved, are:

You can learn more about creating embroidered products with Printful in the video below.

Printful pricing discounts

All of the pricing mentioned so far in this post has been based on Printful’s standard product and printing pricing fees. However, there are several ways to accessing some pretty generous discounts in Printful.

Printful ‘Memberships’ discounts

Printful recently launched a new way for merchants to access cheaper product pricing on the platform — via the ‘Printful memberships’ program.

There are two membership tiers: ‘Printful Growth’ and ‘Printful Business’. The available discounts on each tier are as follows:

Printful merchants need to make $12K per year in sales to access the ‘Growth’ membership discounts, and $60K per year to become a ‘Business’ member.

Alternatively, you can join the ‘Growth’ membership by paying a monthly fee of $24.99, regardless of your sales.

Sample order discounts

The next Printful discount relates to sample orders.

Ordering samples is a key part of running a POD business. Doing so lets you inspect the quality of both the base product (t-shirt, hat, poster and so on) and assess the execution of your design in terms of print quality (color, definition, durability after washing, etc.).

Happily, Printful gives store owners a 20% discount on sample orders (with three products allowed per sample order each month).

Additionally, Printful increases this discount to multiple sample orders when you hit certain sales thresholds on your store — with an upper limit of 5 sample orders permitted each month when you reach $300 in accumulated monthly sales (up to a maximum of 15 sample products).

Bulk order discounts

Finally, there’s Printful’s ‘bulk order’ discount to consider.

Printful direct bulk pricing starts with a minimum order of 25 products and can be used up to a maximum order of 500 items — with discounts ranging from 5% to 55% depending on the product.

So, if you need a large quantity of custom products for a promotion or event, buying in bulk with Printful can bring some significant savings.

You can consult Printful’s bulk pricing calculator to find discounts on more Printful products.

Shipping fees

To get your products to your customers, Printful partners with a range of well-known carriers. These include USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, Canada Post, Australia Post and Royal Mail.

Printful shipping fees depend on the exact location of your end customer. Currently, the company operates 9 shipping regions: the US, EU, UK, Canada, Japan, Australia / New Zealand, Brazil, Japan and worldwide.

Each shipping region has different rates depending on the product you’re shipping.

If you’re shipping your POD products to the US, Printful shipping rates for some key products are as follows:

Printful’s international shipping rates are generally lower than rival POD companies Printify and SPOD.

For example, shipping a Bella and Canvas t-shirt to Canada with Printful would cost $8.29 ($1.10 less than Printify), delivering it to the UK would cost $4.59 ($5.41 less than Printify); and sending it to Australia would cost $7.19 ($5.30 less than Printify).

With SPOD, it costs $4.77 to ship a similar t-shirt to the US, but this shipping cost would rise to $9.89 if your SPOD account is based in the EU rather than the US.

Printful is able to offer more competitive shipping rates than these key competitors thanks to its large network of 15 in-house production facilities.

These enable Printful to print and ship your products from a facility that is located close to your customer; this reduces both shipping times and costs compared to some of its rivals.

You can check more Printful prices for shipping products to various regions using the company’s shipping calculator.

Now we know what it costs for products printing and shipping in Printful, let’s move on to investigate fees for some of the additional services it offers, starting with custom fulfilment.

Custom fulfillment costs with Printful

Printful offers several features when it comes to custom fulfillment options for your print-on-demand business.

These are:

Let’s take a quick look at pricing for these optional services.

Adding branded inserts to packaging

To help you promote your brand and create an ‘unboxing experience’ for your customers when they receive your products, Printful lets you add a range of ‘packaging inserts’ to your packed products.

These include flyers, coupons, business cards, stickers, postcards and thank you cards — all of which Printful will add to your orders before shipping them out.

You can either get these printed by Printful or alternatively get them made yourself and send them on to Printful to use on your orders.

Fees for this service are:

Using branded packaging

Printful uses high-quality ‘white-label’ packaging to send your products to your customer and happily, the cost of this is covered by the fees you pay to Printful for printing and shipping your items.

Depending on the product in question, Printful packs your items in:

While it’s unfortunately not possible to add any branding to these various forms of packaging, it is still possible to use branded outer packaging for your products with Printful.

To do this, you simply send Printful your own branded packaging in which to ship your products.

(For the record, Printful recommends the ‘Sticker Mule,’ ‘Arka’ and ‘PackHelp’ services for creating customized branded mailers. These companies offer large discounts when you buy branded packaging in bulk from them.)

When you send your own-branded packaging to Printful’s fulfillment centers, the company then charges you the following storage fees and order fulfillment fees:

Printful lets you use your own branded packaging for all products except drinkware, wall art, structured hats and stationery.

The available Printful locations to which you can send your custom packaging are:

Warehousing other products with Printful

Printful offers some potentially very useful fulfillment services in the form of warehousing and fulfillment services for other goods you sell on your store (i.e., products you’re not sourcing via Printful).

These work in the same way as other warehouse fulfillment services, such as Amazon’s FBA service or the Shopify Fulfillment Network, which let you send your own products to them for storage, packaging and shipping.

Pricing for Printful’s warehousing and fulfillment service is competitive, with fees ranging from $0.80 to $1.60 per cubic foot and a minimum monthly charge of $150 in the US.

Other fees you’ll need to be aware of are:

So, if you’ve got an ecommerce store that sells products through Printful but also features a product range from other suppliers, it might be worth comparing your current warehousing costs with those offered by Printful.

You can find out more details about how Printful acts as a warehousing and fulfillment company on the Printful website.

Printful pricing: summary

I hope our guide to Printful’s pricing has helped you make sense of all the options available to you!

To sum up, my view is that overall Printful is extremely good value, with some of the key reasons for this being:

For more information about the platform, feel free to check out our full, in-depth, Printful review, or visit the Printful website here. And do leave any questions in the comments section below — we’ll do our best to help!

Alternatives to Printful

Printful is by no means the only POD solution on the market — there are lots of other print on demand services to choose from. Let’s take a look at some of the key ones.

Printify

Printify is one of the strongest contenders to Printful, especially where product catalog size is concerned: it gives you access to a huge selection of 900+ customizable products.

Unlike Printful, Printify uses a large network of third-party print companies to print orders, which can sometimes lead to faster shipping for customers and lower costs for merchants.

You can learn more about how Printify compares with Printful in our detailed Printful vs Printify comparison.

SPOD

SPOD is a print-on-demand company with extremely fast production times for its product catalog of 230+ items. The company claims that around 95% of orders are ready for shipping within 48 hours. SPOD can also potentially be connected to hundreds of ecommerce marketplaces through an integration with the ‘Order Desk’ software automation service.

You can learn more about how SPOD stacks up against Printful here.

Spring (formerly Teespring)

Spring is a print-on-demand company aimed directly at social media content creators. It comes with integrations for Instagram, Twitch, Linktree, OnlyFans and Youtube — making it an interesting POD solution for creators on these platforms to sell custom merch directly to their subscribers.

You can learn more about the Spring platform in our detailed Printful vs Spring comparison article here.

Apliiq

Apliiq is a POD company that specializes in premium apparel products.

Like Printful, Apliiq boasts an extensive selection of customization options, including branded labels, clothing tags and embroidered patches. It also caters for product personalization, allowing customers to design the interior lining of a hoodie or enhance their clothing with added pockets, patches, and other features.

You can learn more about Apliiq and its ‘private labeled’ hoodie options in the video below.