CraftCost

Pricing Handmade Properly, From the SAP Value to the Etsy Receipt

Most candle, soap, and resin sellers don't lose money because their craft is bad — they lose money because the math between "I made a thing" and "I sold a thing" is genuinely hard. Fragrance oil at 9% by wax weight, SAP values multiplied by oil weight, resin Part A plus Part B with inclusion displacement subtracted, labor at $20/hr converted to per-unit cost, Etsy taking 6.5% transaction plus 3% payment processing plus $0.20 listing — every step has its own gotcha, and a single missed number turns a $24 candle into a $4 candle once you back the cost out. CraftCost is the one screen where every one of those numbers gets handled, in the order a real maker would handle them.

Why Hobbyists Almost Always Underprice

The single most common pricing mistake among new craft sellers is forgetting labor — not because they're being noble about it, but because labor doesn't show up on a receipt. The wax cost $14, the wicks were $2, the jars were $8, the fragrance was $6, the labels were $2 — that's $32 in materials for a 12-jar pour and a tempting "$3 per jar" cost basis. But the pour, the cure, the labeling, the photographing, the listing, and the shipping took six hours of your time. At even $15/hr that's $90 of labor, or $7.50 per jar — more than double the materials. A retail price built on materials-only is a retail price that's actually paying you nothing per hour. CraftCost forces labor as a required field for exactly this reason.

Etsy Fees Are Worse Than They Look

Etsy's published fees sound mild: $0.20 to list, 6.5% transaction, 3% + $0.25 payment processing in the US (higher in some countries). On a $25 candle that's $0.20 + $1.63 + $1.00 = $2.83, or about 11.3% of revenue. But Etsy also applies the transaction fee to your shipping charge, and offsite ads (which most sellers don't realize are opt-in by default once you hit $10K) add another 12-15% on those orders. CraftCost models every one of these so the retail number it gives you is a retail number you actually keep — not a sticker price you watch erode into a tip. Shopify, Faire wholesale, and direct sales each get their own fee profile.

SAP Values, Lye Math, and Why You Should Always Run the Numbers

Cold-process soap is unforgiving. Olive oil's SAP is 0.135 for NaOH; coconut's is 0.190; shea butter's is 0.128. Get the SAP table wrong and your bar is either lye-heavy (skin burn) or fat-heavy (soft, won't cure). Superfat is the percentage of oils you intentionally leave un-saponified for skin feel — typically 3-7%. CraftCost ships with 40+ oil SAP values from published reference sources, multiplies them by your oil weights, sums the lye, applies the superfat reduction, calculates water at your chosen water-to-lye ratio, and tells you the lye discount in grams. For specialty oils not in the database, enter a custom SAP value once and the app saves it per-oil for every future recipe.

Wholesale vs Retail Markup Is Not One Number

A standard wholesale price is roughly 2× the COGS (cost of goods sold including labor); standard retail is 2× wholesale, or 4× COGS. Boutiques and craft fair organizers expect the wholesale number to leave room for their own retail markup — if you sell to them at retail, they have nothing left to make. CraftCost outputs both the wholesale and retail price for the same recipe with the same target margin, so when a boutique buyer asks "what's your wholesale on these," you have an answer ready that won't bankrupt either of you. The math also adapts to platform: Etsy retail bakes in the platform fees; direct retail doesn't.

Batch Costing Beats Per-Unit Costing for Candles

A 12-jar candle pour has fixed costs (the wick centering jig you bought once) and per-unit costs (one jar, one wick, one label per candle), and trying to track those as a single per-unit number is fragile. CraftCost handles this as batch costing — the entire pour is logged as one batch with materials consumed deducted from inventory, then divided by jars produced to get accurate per-jar COGS. When you change wax suppliers or your fragrance oil price moves, you re-run the calculator on the new costs and you can see exactly what that did to your margin. The batch log keeps a history so "remember that lemongrass batch from last spring" isn't a memory exercise.

Fragrance Oil Load, Wick Size, and the Numbers That Aren't on the Bottle

Fragrance oil load is the percentage of fragrance to wax by weight. Most soy waxes hold 6-9% safely; some specialty waxes hold up to 12%. Go over the wax's flash point and your candle throws weakly, tunnels, or refuses to fully solidify. Wick size depends on container diameter, wax type, and fragrance load — a 3-inch soy candle with 8% fragrance generally wants a CD-12 or ECO-10, but every wax and wick brand publishes its own chart. CraftCost's quick reference includes these tables alongside the calculators, so the moment a recipe is computed you have the sanity check one tap away. Get the wick wrong and the candle either tunnels (too small) or smokes (too big) — neither is a returning-customer outcome.

Inventory and Low-Stock Alerts for Working Makers

Running out of fragrance oil mid-pour is the kind of mistake you only make once before you start tracking inventory. CraftCost's inventory module logs every raw material with quantity on hand, supplier, and unit cost. Every batch you log automatically deducts materials consumed from inventory. Set a reorder threshold per material (Premium) and you get a notification when wax, lye, or any other supply drops below the threshold — early enough to order before your next batch is blocked. Supplier links go in the notes field so you don't have to remember whether the cocoa butter came from Bramble Berry or Wholesale Supplies Plus.

Privacy, Offline, and Why the Free Tier Actually Works

Every calculation, every recipe, every inventory entry, every batch log lives on your phone. No account, no cloud sync, no analytics on your batch data. The app works completely offline — important when you're calculating a quote at a craft fair booth with no Wi-Fi, or in a workshop where the router is on the other side of the building. The free tier is the full calculator: candle, soap, resin, pricing with Etsy fees, quick reference cards. The five-recipe save limit is the only meaningful cap; everything else is just ads and the convenience features (full inventory, batch log, CSV export, pricing templates) that turn the app from a calculator into a tiny back office for your craft business.

For Estimation — Always Verify Against Your Suppliers

CraftCost is a calculator, not a substitute for reading the safety data sheet on your lye, the flash point on your fragrance oil, or the cure schedule on your resin. SAP values vary slightly between published references and supplier batches; fragrance load limits depend on the specific wax formulation; resin mix ratios shift between brands and even between batches of the same brand. Every result screen reminds you to verify against your supplier's published guidance before you mix at scale. Treat the numbers as well-researched defaults that get you to a recipe ready for a small test pour, not as a license to skip the supplier's documentation. For estimation only.