What to Charge When You Made It Yourself

You made the thing and it is good. You know it is good, because you made three versions and threw two of them away, and the one on the table in front of you is the one that survived. What is missing is a number, and the number has been typed and deleted five times tonight.

Here is the part nobody says out loud. Pricing is not a test of how much you believe in yourself. It is arithmetic, done once, in about twenty minutes, with a piece of paper and the real figures from your own bank account. When the arithmetic is finished you will have a price you can say out loud without your voice changing, because you will be able to explain every part of it. A price you can defend is a price you stop relitigating, and somebody who has stopped relitigating their price has that whole hour back to make the next thing.

How do I work out what to charge when I made it myself?

Add three things and round up: materials, your hours at a rate you would accept from a stranger, and this item's share of your fixed costs. Do it on paper with real figures rather than in your head, because the version in your head always leaves something out.

Worked once, for an object. A ceramic planter: eleven dollars of clay, glaze and firing. Two hours of work at thirty dollars an hour. Then roughly six dollars of the month's studio rent, kiln electricity, packaging and listing fees, divided across the twenty pieces you will actually sell. Eleven plus sixty plus six is seventy seven. Round up to eighty five.

Worked again, for an hour of work. Take the yearly income you want and divide it by the hours you can genuinely bill, which is never forty a week and is usually closer to half that once you count quoting, admin and the work that does not get paid for. Add your fixed costs, so software, insurance, hardware, the accountant. Then add tax, which is the input people leave out entirely.

Two numbers, twenty minutes, and the price box is no longer empty.

What hourly rate should I pay myself?

Use the rate you would accept from a stranger who wanted to hire you tomorrow, not the rate you would quote a friend. Then check it against what working for yourself actually costs, because your hour is not the same product as an employed hour.

The most common mistake is quietly benchmarking against a salary. A salaried hour comes with paid leave, somebody else's software, an employer covering half the payroll taxes, and a paycheck that arrives whether or not the work does. Yours comes with none of that. In the United States the self-employment tax rate is 15.3 percent, made up of 12.4 percent for Social Security and 2.9 percent for Medicare, and it sits on top of income tax. Whatever number you were about to write down, that alone is a reason it is too low.

The stranger test works because it moves the question out of your feelings and into evidence. You already know roughly what you would pay a person with your skill to do this for you. Pay yourself that. If saying it out loud feels uncomfortable, that is not a pricing signal, it is a speaking problem, and it is fixed by saying the number a few times before anybody asks.

Which costs do people forget to put in the price?

The small recurring ones, every time: platform and payment fees, shipping supplies, the software subscription, the order that goes wrong, and the hour of admin each sale quietly takes. None of them appear on the item in front of you, which is exactly why they end up coming out of your own pay.

Write them down for one real month rather than estimating them.

• Platform fees and payment processing on every single sale.
• Boxes, tape, tissue, labels, and the trip to send them.
• Software, hosting, and the tools you forgot were charging you.
• The one item in ten that arrives broken and gets replaced.
• The hour per order spent messaging, packing and updating.

Then divide that monthly total by the number of items you sell in a month, and add the result to every price. This is the difference between a business that is busy and a business that pays you.

What is the number under the number?

Write a floor beneath your price, in advance, and do not go below it. The floor is materials plus fixed costs plus the lowest hourly rate you would still be glad to work for, and its job is to turn every discount conversation into a two second decision instead of a two day one.

The flinch is not a signal that the price is wrong. It is a signal that you are the one who has to say it out loud. A number you have checked twice that still makes you pause is usually in the right neighborhood, because you are the only person who knows how easy the work felt, and ease is invisible to everybody else and irrelevant to what the thing is worth.

Set the price. Then leave it alone for a week and let real people react to it rather than to your nerves. Changing a price because of evidence is strategy. Changing it at eleven at night because nobody has bought anything in two days is the tax that uncontrolled pressure charges on good work, and it is the most expensive habit in this whole article.

What do I say when somebody asks for a discount?

One sentence, and it names what you can change instead of the price. "I can't go below that, but I can do it without the hand stitching for one forty, or I can hold this one for you until the fifteenth."

You are not obliged to explain your costs, justify your hours or apologize for the number. A discount given quickly teaches the next customer to ask and teaches you to resent the order. Offering a smaller version, a longer timeline or a payment split keeps the price intact and still gives the person a real route to yes.

If they walk, they walk. Somebody who only wanted it at half is not a customer you lost, they are a customer you never had, and the hours you did not spend working below your floor are hours available for somebody who pays in full.

Tell the next person your real number

Here is a move that costs you nothing and changes the market you are standing in. When somebody newer asks how you priced something, give them the actual figures. Not the method, not "it depends", not a range so wide it says nothing. The clay was eleven dollars, the hours were two, the rate was thirty, the price is eighty five.

Underpricing survives almost entirely on silence. Nobody says out loud what they really charge, so everybody assumes they are the expensive one and quietly comes down, and a whole category talks itself into working for free. One person answering honestly breaks that for everybody they tell, and those people tell others. Information is the one thing here you can hand over without losing a single customer, and the person you hand it to remembers who told them.

So do the arithmetic tonight. Write the price, write the floor underneath it, and say both out loud until they are boring. Then go and charge it, and put the hour you would have spent doubting into the next thing you make.

Sources

• Internal Revenue Service, Self-employment tax (Social Security and Medicare taxes)
• U.S. Small Business Administration, Plan your business
• Federal Reserve Banks, 2025 Report on Nonemployer Firms