Setting Up Print Pricing by Color Count and Size

A single flat print price is easy to set up and easy to get wrong. Charge enough to cover a five-color front print, and a two-color sleeve mark pays a premium it doesn't need. Charge little enough that the two-color mark stays competitive, and the five-color front print quietly loses money on every order. Complexity has a real production cost — more colors, more setup, more time — and pricing that ignores it either overcharges simple designs or undercharges complex ones. The fix isn't a better guess; it's pricing that follows the variables that actually drive cost.

Printing types set the rules

Custy lets a merchant configure printing types to match however a shop actually produces work. DTG, DTF, and embroidery are the methods most stores set up first, but a printing type in Custy is just a name a merchant defines — nothing stops a shop from adding another one for any other production method it runs. Every printing type a merchant creates gets the same two pricing tools: per-color-count rules and per-size-range rules. Embroidery doesn't need a different pricing engine from DTF — a merchant plugs different numbers into the same two rule types for each method a product supports, so a five-color DTG front print and a two-color embroidery patch are still priced on their own terms instead of one flat price. See how printing types fit into the wider toolset on Features.

Price by color count

Every printing type supports per-color pricing rules: a merchant sets a price increment for each additional color a design uses, so a one-color print and a six-color print are never priced the same. This is configured once, on the printing type, and applied automatically every time a shopper's design in the Design Lab crosses a color threshold. Shoppers get a price that reflects the design they actually built, and merchants stop absorbing the cost of complexity they never priced for in the first place.

Price by size range

Garment size is its own cost driver — a larger size uses more fabric and, on some print methods, more printable area than a smaller one — so Custy also supports size-range pricing: a merchant defines ranges across a product's sizes and sets a price adjustment for each range. Combined with per-color pricing, this lets a single product carry pricing that reflects both what's printed on it and what it's printed onto, without a merchant maintaining a separate listing for every size and color combination a shopper might choose.

Restrictions handle what pricing can't

Per-color and per-size rules cover what a design costs to produce — but a couple of things aren't really pricing problems, and Custy's restriction rules handle those instead: a minimum and maximum order quantity for a printing type, and a default image treatment applied to a shopper's raster uploads.

The quantity gate exists because some methods carry real setup cost that a per-unit price alone doesn't offset. Embroidery is the clearest case: a merchant can restrict it to orders above a minimum quantity so a single-unit run doesn't undercut the setup work behind it, or cap it below a maximum on a product that isn't set up for a bulk run. The default image treatment solves a different problem — it applies a set look, such as grayscale or sepia, to an uploaded photo before it prints, so a method that's meant to look a particular way doesn't end up printing whatever colors happen to be in someone's upload.

Restrictions and pricing work together, not against each other: a printing type can be priced correctly by color count and size range and still be gated by a minimum quantity, or have its uploads pushed through a default treatment — two different problems, solved on the same printing type.

A worked walkthrough

Setting this up on a real product looks like:

1. Open the product's pricing setup and add a printing type — DTG, DTF, or embroidery — for each method the product actually supports.
2. Under that printing type, add color rules: a base price plus an increment per additional color, so a two-color and a five-color design are never priced the same.
3. Add size ranges with their own price adjustments, so garment sizing is priced with the same rigor as color count.
4. Set restrictions where a method actually needs them — a minimum or maximum order quantity for a setup-heavy method like embroidery, or a default image treatment for raster uploads — so each method behaves the way this product requires.

Full detail on how these rules connect to the rest of product setup lives on How It Works. Once the rules are in place, every order prices itself: no spreadsheet, no manual quote, and no margin quietly lost to a design nobody accounted for when the price was first set.

Pricing by color count and size range takes a little more setup than one flat number, but it's the difference between a print price that's roughly right and one that's actually right — for the one-color neck tag and the six-color front print alike, on every size a shopper picks.