Screen print pricing is about spreading setup. DTG pricing is the opposite problem: there is barely any setup, and the per-print cost hardly moves however many you run. Price it like screen print and you will lose money on the volume orders and turn away the one-offs you should be winning.
What a DTG print actually costs
| Cost line | Typical driver | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Blank | Per garment | Combed, ring-spun cotton prints noticeably better, and costs more |
| Pretreat | Per dark garment | Fluid plus the press time to dry it |
| Ink, colour | Coverage area | Rises fast with a full front print |
| Ink, white | Dark garments only | Usually the single biggest ink cost |
| Machine time | Per print | Pretreat, print, cure; take it from your own cycle time |
| Cure | Per print | Dryer or press time and power |
| Maintenance | Amortised | Head cleans, wipes, waste ink, service |
| Waste | Percentage | Your real reprint rate, not your hoped-for one |
Two numbers matter more than the rest: white ink on darks, and your maintenance amortisation. A DTG printer that sits idle still costs money in head maintenance, so low utilisation quietly raises your true cost per print.
The light / dark split
Do not try to average across garment colours. Build two costs:
- Light garments: no pretreat, no white underbase, faster cycle.
- Dark garments: pretreat applied and dried, white underbase laid down, more ink, longer cycle.
Dark can easily cost two to three times what light costs. One blended price means light prints subsidise dark ones, and your customers will notice which way to push you.
Finding your crossover with screen print
Take one design and cost it both ways at several quantities. The point where the lines cross is where you should be steering customers, and it is a real number for your shop rather than a rule of thumb.
| Quantity | DTG total | Screen print total | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | £9 | £62 | DTG |
| 12 | £108 | £96 | Screen |
| 24 | £216 | £130 | Screen |
| 50 | £450 | £202 | Screen |
Those figures use a £9 DTG cost per dark garment and a screen job with £54 of setup plus £3.20 a shirt. Substitute your own and the shape stays the same: DTG is a straight line from the origin, screen print starts high and flattens. See how to price screen printing for the other side of that comparison.
Pricing structure that works
- Two base prices, light and dark.
- A size band for the print area, for example up to A4, up to A3, oversize.
- A second-position charge, because it is a second full cycle.
- No setup fee, and say so. It is your genuine advantage on small orders.
- A minimum order value rather than a minimum quantity, so single-piece work stays worth handling.
The trap: quoting DTG like a photocopier
A full-front, edge-to-edge design on a black hoodie is not the same job as a small left-chest logo on a white tee, and pricing them the same is how shops end up busy and broke. Charge by coverage band and garment colour, and the arithmetic looks after itself.
The cost you cannot see on the invoice: utilisation
A DTG printer costs money when it is standing still. Head maintenance, cleaning cycles, the ink you flush, the service contract and the finance payment all accrue whether the machine ran ten prints today or two hundred. That means your true cost per print is not a property of the print. It is a property of how busy the machine is.
| Prints per month | Monthly ownership cost | Fixed cost per print |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | £600 | £3.00 |
| 500 | £600 | £1.20 |
| 1,200 | £600 | £0.50 |
Same machine, same job, and a £2.50 swing in cost per print. This is why two shops quoting the same DTG job can both be right and both be profitable at very different prices, and why buying a second machine before the first one is busy is the most expensive mistake in the category.
Two practical consequences. First, if utilisation is low, chase volume before you chase price: a standing order from one club or one online store fixes your cost base faster than a price rise. Second, never quote from a cost per print you calculated in a busy month.
Where DTG margin actually leaks
White ink on darks, under-counted. Underbase coverage is the single largest ink line on a dark garment and it does not scale with the visible design: a light-coloured design on black needs a solid underbase behind every visible pixel. Price dark garments as their own tier and measure the ink cost on a real job rather than trusting the spec sheet.
Pretreat drying time counted as free. Pretreat has to be applied and dried before the print starts. That is press time, operator attention and power, and on a small order it is a meaningful share of the cycle.
Second-position prints priced as an add-on. A back print is a second full cycle: reload, realign, print, cure. It costs close to what the first one cost.
Rejects absorbed rather than priced. See the waste question below. A 4 percent reject rate on a £9 cost is 36p a print, every print, whether or not this particular job went wrong.
Job costing tells you which DTG work to keep
DTG shops usually discover that their profitable work is not the work they talk about. Single-piece retail orders often carry the best percentage margin and the worst margin per hour. Twelve-piece club orders often look thin and are the best use of the machine. You cannot tell which is which from the quote, because the quote does not know how long the job took.
The measurable version is straightforward. Staff clock on to the job at the press, so the hours land against the order at their own labour rate. The job costing report then shows gross margin and margin after labour for every job, grouped by decoration method, so DTG can be compared honestly against screen print and DTF rather than against a feeling.
The pattern to look for is margin per shop hour rather than margin per garment. A £40 job that took ten minutes beats a £180 job that took three hours, and only one of those two is worth building a business on.
Reprints and the honest way to handle them
DTG has a higher reject rate than screen print, and pretending otherwise makes your pricing wrong rather than your reputation better. Build the measured rate into the cost line, keep the reprint policy explicit, and log the cause every time so the number tells you something. Handling a reprint request covers the script; reducing misprints covers the checklist that brings the number down.
If pretreat is where your rejects come from, that is a process problem rather than a pricing one: see DTG pretreat troubleshooting. Printer's Friend prices per decoration method, so DTG jobs carry their own cost model, pretreat step and cure schedule rather than being bent into a screen print workflow.