Print on demand profit: what shipping takes off the top

The short version

Sources: Printify pricing, Printify shipping rates, Printful pricing, Printful shipping and the Printful Bella + Canvas 3001 listing, all read September 2026.

The example with a line missing

Printify’s pricing page carries a worked example, and it is the clearest statement of how this business gets sold:

Both statements are true and the footnote is not hidden. But the headline number is the one that gets repeated, and it describes a sale in which nothing is posted to anybody.

Printify does not publish a shipping rate we can read (see below), so we have to borrow one. Printful publishes $4.95 for a single shirt to the US, is itself listed as a Printify print provider, and is owned by the same parent company. Using that figure:

That is 44% below the “over $11” in the example, and it is the optimistic version: it assumes one item, one print placement, a domestic address and no returns. Shipping is 56% on top of the blank and 36% of the landed cost of the unit.

Printify’s own t-shirt pricing calculator handles this better than its pricing page does: it offers an “Additional costs” field, footnoted as covering “shipping, marketing, or other product-related expenses”. Worth knowing that the value it is pre-filled with is $4 — less, on its own, than a single shirt’s published shipping, with marketing and everything else still to come out of it.

Our arithmetic on published figures, not a vendor calculation. The $4.95 is Printful’s rate, not Printify’s, and is used because Printify publishes none we could read. The precise figure is not what carries the point: any shipping cost above zero reduces $11.22, and no plausible US rate leaves the headline intact.

What shipping actually costs

Printful states that its “fixed Standard shipping rates are calculated based on the average shipping cost for each product category”, and publishes them. Every rate has two parts: what the first item costs, and what each additional item in the same category adds.

Read down the first column and one assumption falls over: shipping does not scale with the price of the product. An 11oz mug ships for $6.69, more than a shirt, while costing far less as a blank. What the carrier charges for is bulk and fragility; your margin spreadsheet is organised by price.

On Printful’s own catalog the standard Bella + Canvas 3001 starts at $11.92, and Printful states its base price covers “the blank product, one print or embroidery design placement, fulfillment”. Landed, one shirt to a US address is $16.87. At Printify’s example retail of $19.99 that leaves $3.12 before fees — which is why pricing advice in this niche keeps arriving at $24 to $28 shirts.

Note “one print or embroidery design placement”. A front-and-back design is a second placement and costs more than the catalog price. We could not read Printful’s additional-placement rates at source, so no figure for them appears here or in any total above.

Your discount is on the smaller half of the bill

Both platforms sell a subscription whose headline benefit is a product discount. Printful Growth is $24.99 a month, free on reaching $12K a year in sales, and gives “up to 33% off product pricing”. Printify Premium is $39 monthly or $24.99 billed yearly, and gives “up to 33% discount on new products” and “up to 20% discount on all products”.

Neither discounts shipping. Printful lists its Growth savings as product pricing, branding and sample orders, and describes shipping separately as depending on “product type, order size, and destination”. So the percentage is applied to the smaller of your two costs on a single-item order, and the number that matters is what it does to the landed total.

An advertised 33% is really 21% off the unit. That is still real money, and neither vendor claims otherwise — both say the discount is on products. But it is the difference between a subscription that pays for itself at one volume and one that needs a third more. Our Printify Premium vs Printful Growth breakdown works that break-even in full, on product spend alone, for exactly this reason.

Our arithmetic on published rates. Built on Printify’s $8.77 example blank plus Printful’s $4.95 shirt shipping. On Printful’s own $11.92 blank the same 33% is worth $3.93, or 23.3% of a $16.87 landed cost — the pattern holds and the exact figure moves with the blank.

The free lever, and the category where it fails

Because shipping is charged per order rather than per item, the strongest cost lever available to a print-on-demand store is not the subscription or the supplier. It is how many items are in the parcel.

One shirt on the numbers above lands at $13.72. Two shirts in one order cost $17.54 of blanks plus $7.15 of shipping, which is $12.35 a unit. Three is $11.89.

Set that against the subscription. Printify Premium’s 20% all-products discount is worth $1.75 a shirt and costs $24.99 a month at best. Moving a customer from one shirt to two is worth $1.37 a shirt and costs nothing. A free upsell is doing about four-fifths of the work a paid plan does, which is not how this decision is usually framed.

The catch is that the size of that lever is set by the product category, and the spread is enormous:

That is roughly a twenty-one to one difference between the best and worst categories. “Sell bundles” appears in every print-on-demand guide as a single piece of advice; it is close to decisive for a poster shop and close to meaningless for a canvas shop, where the second item ships at almost full rate.

Our arithmetic on Printful’s published US rates. The additional-item rate applies within a category; Printful notes that “multiple shipment orders will have higher shipping costs than single shipment orders”, so a mixed parcel is not the same case. We could not verify at source how a cross-category order is rated, and no mixed-basket figure appears above.

Printify does not have a shipping rate

Printful prints what it sells, so it publishes one rate card. Printify is a routing layer over a network of independent print shops — its shipping rates page is a directory of more than a hundred of them, each with its own page, telling you to “find shipping rates for all our Print Providers here”. Printful is itself one of the providers listed.

So the same design, ordered by the same customer, ships at a different cost depending which provider the job is routed to. Provider pages also carry their own surcharges: two we opened both state that shipping to European countries carries an additional $3.50 charge, which is a provider-level rule rather than a platform-level one.

The consequence is that on Printify, which print shop you pick is a pricing decision rather than only a quality and speed one, and there is no single number to set against Printful’s $4.95. Pick the provider before you set your retail price, not after.

What Canva does and does not settle

This page previously told readers to build a design in Canva and sell it. We are retracting the confident version of that, because we cannot check it: Canva’s content license agreement, its licensing explainer and its help article on creating products for sale all returned HTTP 403 to us, as its pricing pages have on every attempt over several months. No Canva licence term or price appears anywhere on this page, and we will not restate one from a roundup. Open the licence in your own browser and read the merchandise clauses before you list.

What is readable is the fulfilment side, and it is unambiguous about where the risk sits. Printify’s intellectual property policy states that “you alone are responsible for Content that You and/or Your Customers upload”, and that you must either own it or “otherwise have the legal right” to use it. Printify also reserves the right to “reject the production of User Products that contain Content that we have reason to believe may be infringing” — so a product can be stopped without anyone having complained.

Printify’s own seller guidance is the sensible procedure whatever your design tool: confirm “each licensing agreement allows physical product resale”, and save “the receipt, license page, asset ID, and usage terms”. A records habit, not a legal opinion, and the part most sellers skip. If you sell designs as files rather than on products, our guides to Canva Pro printables on Etsy and Gumroad vs Payhip vs Lemon Squeezy cover the storefront side.

What we could not verify

Stated plainly rather than filled in with figures we could not read at source.

• Canva, entirely. Four URLs this cycle — the content license agreement on two hosts, the licensing explainer and the products-for-sale help article — all returned HTTP 403, adding to pricing pages that have failed repeatedly. No Canva figure or licence term is stated anywhere above, in either direction.
• Printify’s actual shipping rates. Every per-provider rate table we opened renders client-side and showed us “Loading shipping rates…” instead of numbers. Every shipping figure on this page is Printful’s published rate, labelled as such at each use. The $3.50 European surcharge is static text on two provider pages and we treat it as provider-level, not platform-level.
• Additional print placements. Printful states the base price covers one placement; we could not read the price of a second at source, so a front-and-back design is described as costing more without a number attached.
• Marketplace and payment fees. Etsy’s fee pages have not been readable to us, so every figure here stops at the landed cost and none of them is a net profit. Add your storefront’s cut yourself — our Shopify transaction fee breakdown covers one of the two common cases.
• Whether the $8.77 example is a real catalog product. Printify presents it as an example, not as a listing, and does not name the blank. We use it because it is the vendor’s own chosen illustration of its own economics, which is the point; the Printful $11.92 figure is a named catalog product and is given alongside it.
• Cross-category orders. Printful states that multiple-shipment orders cost more, but we could not read how a basket spanning two categories is rated. All bundling arithmetic above is within one category.
• Returns, reprints and lost parcels. None of these figures carries a defect or return allowance, and print-on-demand returns are not free to the seller. Treat every number here as a best case.

FAQ

What we would actually do

Price the unit, not the product. Take the blank, add the published shipping for one item in that category, and treat that sum as your cost floor. Everything else in this niche — the mockups, the trending-design advice, the subscription comparisons — sits on top of a number most sellers have never written down.

Then pick the category with the lever in it. If the plan is to grow average order value, posters and phone cases repay it and canvas prints do not, and that is a decision made before the first design rather than after the first hundred sales. Stay on both free plans until your blank spend says otherwise, and read a discount as what it is worth per unit rather than as the percentage on the banner. If you are still choosing the storefront underneath all this, start with our Shopify review and the real cost of Shopify transaction fees.

Related reads: Printify Premium vs Printful Growth, Canva Pro printables on Etsy, Gumroad vs Payhip vs Lemon Squeezy, building a Shopify store with AI, and our Canva Pro review.