CANDLE, SOAP & RESIN PRICING
CraftCost
Candle, Soap & Resin Pricing
CraftCost sizes the batch first — wax and fragrance, lye and superfat, resin and hardener — then prices it with your labour rate, your selling fee and the margin you are aiming for. Four calculators, one phone, no account.
Free to use. $5.99 one-time unlock.
Android.
WORKED WITH THE APP'S OWN ARITHMETIC
An eight-ounce soy candle, twenty-two minutes of your time, sold on Etsy. This is the order CraftCost adds it up in, and the line most makers have never looked at.
WHAT YOU TYPE IN
The labour line is a rate and a number of minutes, not a shrug. Set the rate once in Settings and it is waiting on every job after that.
WHAT COMES BACK
That last line is the point. A 50% markup on cost is a 33.3% margin on the sale price, and the gap between those two numbers is what quietly eats a craft business. CraftCost prints both, so you price against the real one. There is a wholesale line as well, set at twice your cost.
You cannot cost a candle until you know how much wax goes in the jar. Each calculator takes the container and hands back the weights.
Candle
Enter the container volume in fluid ounces and pick your wax. CraftCost converts to cubic inches, applies that wax's density and returns the wax weight, the fragrance oil at your chosen load, the dye, and a wick size for the container diameter — cotton and wooden. Seven waxes are built in with their melt and pour temperatures.
Soap
Add your oils by weight and CraftCost looks up each one's SAP value, sums the lye needed, discounts it by your superfat percentage and works out the water at your water-to-lye ratio. NaOH for bars, KOH for liquid soap. Forty-three oils and fats sit in the table, and every value is readable again in Quick Reference.
Arithmetic, not a safety check. Verify against a second source before you mix — lye is caustic.
Resin
Give it the mould volume and the brand or ratio you are pouring. It splits the volume into resin and hardener by parts, and takes off whatever percentage of the mould your embeds are displacing, so you do not mix a cup you cannot use. Single-component UV resin is handled as its own case.
Scroll sideways, or focus the row and use the arrow keys.
Any calculation can be saved as a recipe with its inputs intact, so next month's repeat is a tap rather than a re-type. Five recipes on the free version.
Every wax, oil, fragrance, dye, resin, hardener and packaging item, with what you have on hand, its unit cost, its supplier and a reorder level. Anything at or under that level is flagged low, and the app carries a running value for the shelf.
Record what you actually made: the recipe, the date, how many came out, what it cost and a one-to-five quality rating. CraftCost divides through to a cost per unit, which is the figure worth feeding back into pricing.
Four tables you would otherwise be searching for with sticky fingers: wax melt and pour temperatures, SAP values for forty-three oils, a wick chart by container diameter, and resin mix ratios by brand.
Prices in US dollars, pounds, euros, Canadian or Australian dollars. Weights and volumes in metric or imperial. Both are one switch in Settings.
English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, translated inside the app rather than left to the phone.
FREE
$0
ONE-TIME UNLOCK
$5.99once
EITHER WAY
The four calculators and the reference tables are free and show ads, and five saved recipes are included. A one-time $5.99 unlock lifts the recipe cap, opens the ingredient inventory and the batch log, and removes the ads.
The slider sets markup on cost, not margin on the sale price. Ask for 50% and the app adds half your cost as profit, which is a 33.3% margin once it is a share of the retail price. The Actual Margin line shows you the real figure.
Etsy at 6.5%, Shopify at 2.9%, Amazon at 15%, a no-fee option, and a custom percentage you type in yourself. The fee is applied to materials, labour, packaging and shipping together.
Check every batch against a second source before you mix. CraftCost applies published SAP values per oil and your superfat setting. It is arithmetic, not a safety check, and lye is caustic.
Yes. Every calculation, recipe, inventory item and batch is stored on your phone. A connection is only used to serve ads in the free version.
No. $5.99 once, and nothing renews. There is no account and no email address to hand over.
The calculators are free. Put in one product you already sell and read what the actual margin line says.