Radical transparency
Posters are free for everyone, forever. Songs are the thank-you for keeping it that way.
A shop has to hide its costs. A nonprofit does not. Every figure on this page is read out of the code that actually spends the money, and every one says where it came from. Where we do not have a number yet, this page says so rather than invent one.
Start with the honest part: both of them cost us real money. Anyone who tells you a poster is free to make is rounding in their own favor.
The difference is what the money buys. A song is sung by an outside vendor, one render per song, billed to us the moment it is made and whether or not anybody ever plays it. A poster's cost is mostly translation: we pay once to put its words into every language we publish, and then that one poster serves every reader on the wall, in all of those languages, for as long as the site exists.
So a song costs about two and a half times what a poster costs, and that cost is spent again for every single song. A poster's cost is mostly a one-time translation that then serves every reader of that phrase, in every language, forever. The poster is the help, and the help does not get a price tag. That is the whole argument, and the numbers below are the proof.
One custom song
$0.477
Measured Prices in lib/spend-guard.js. One member action makes one song, not three: lib/create-gen.js line 229.
One poster
$0.187
Measured Price in lib/spend-guard.js, the 82% share in lib/translate.js.
One custom video
$0.85
Measured Price in lib/spend-guard.js.
One detail worth knowing, because it is the reason the poster bill never falls: every tip we write is unique on purpose, so no translation we buy can ever be reused for another poster. We pay for all 35 translated languages, on every single poster, every time.
Nothing in the shop is priced by feel. One function does all of it: take what the printer actually charges us for that exact item and size, double it, then round up to the next price ending in .99. That is the entire pricing policy, and it is four lines long in lib/merch.js.
| Item | Printer charges us | You pay | Card fee | KEEP CALM keeps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tri-Blend Tee, S to XL | $24.09 | $48.99 | $1.72 | $23.18 47% |
| Tri-Blend Tee, 2XL and up | $27.13 | $54.99 | $1.89 | $25.97 47% |
| Poster print, 18 by 24 inches | $4.88 | $9.99 | $0.59 | $4.52 45% |
One assumption The card fee is the only number on this page we do not read from a vendor. It is the published US online card rate, 2.9% plus 30 cents, and lib/bundle.js labels it an assumption rather than burying it inside a formula. If your card costs us more than that, the last column is smaller than it says.
Read the last column carefully, because it is not profit. "KEEP CALM keeps" is what is left after the printer and the card, and before shipping, hosting, storage, and every hour of human work. No figure on this page claims to cover a salary.
The Calm Set is a tee, its matching print, and a wallpaper pack. Bought separately those come to $58.98. As a set they are $49.99, so you save $8.99, about 15%.
Here is the part a shop would not show you. The printer still charges us $28.97 and the card still takes $1.75, so we keep $19.27, which is 39% of the price instead of the 47% we keep on the tee alone. The discount comes out of our side, not the printer's. That is what a discount is, and it is fine, but it should not be a secret.
The wallpaper pack in that set is listed at zero dollars, because it costs zero dollars: it is rendered, not printed. Giving it an invented sticker price to make the savings look bigger is the oldest trick in the bundle trade, and we are not running it on a nonprofit's checkout.
Measured Every number in this section comes from lib/bundle.js, whose own test suite checks the arithmetic.
If a figure here is wrong, it is wrong in public, and you can hold us to it: Contact@KeepCalm.org. The promise these numbers pay for is written out in the Free Help Guarantee, and if you want to keep it funded you can give the gift of calm.