What the setup lump actually contains
Four things get paid once no matter how many pieces follow: the screens, the film or output that images them, the minutes spent registering on press, and the strike-off you print and look at before you commit. This page asks for the first as a per-screen cost and the rest as a block of setup minutes at your own hourly rate, because that is how they behave — a second colour adds a screen and a little more registration, while a second hundred pieces adds neither.
Everything else scales with the count. Ink is per piece per colour. Press time is per piece. Blanks are per piece and, crucially, identical whichever way you decorate, which is why the blank never appears in the crossover — it cancels out of both sides of the comparison and only shows up in the job total.
Reading the crossover
The crossover quantity is the run length at which the setup-heavy method has recovered its head start. Below it, the method with no setup wins on total cost. Above it, the cheaper per-piece cost has had enough pieces to catch up. The arithmetic is one line: the setup difference divided by the per-piece difference, rounded up to a whole piece.
Two branches surprise people. If the setup-free method also costs less per piece, there is no crossover at all and no quantity rescues the screens. And if the screen job somehow costs less to set up and less per piece, it wins at a single piece — check your inputs, because that is usually a sign the setup minutes are understated.
What this page will not tell you
It will not price the job. Cost is not price, and the markup, the overhead recovery and whatever the customer will pay are separate questions — the job cost and markup calculator handles that side, and the break-even calculator handles the monthly fixed-cost version. It will not tell you whether the result is a good margin, because that depends on things this page cannot see.
It also has no opinion about what you are printing. Whether you may reproduce a logo, a team name, a character or someone else's artwork is a legal question with a lawyer and a rights holder at the end of it, not an arithmetic one.
Related
Work the ink line out from image area and deposit with the ink coverage calculator, and the screen charge itself with the emulsion and reclaim cost calculator. If the alternative you are comparing is cut vinyl, the vinyl and decal material calculator gives you the material and weeding side of that number, and the heat press cycle time calculator gives you the seconds.
Questions people ask
Why does the blank cost not change the crossover?
Because it is the same on both sides. If a blank costs $4.20 whether you screen print it or press a transfer onto it, it adds the same amount to both totals and cancels out of the difference. It matters enormously to the job total and not at all to which method is cheaper. That is also why a supplier switching you to a cheaper blank never changes which decoration method you should be using.
Should the screen charge be what I pay or what I charge?
What it costs you. The field is your own cost to prepare one screen — output or film, emulsion, exposure, the reclaim cycle and the share of the frame it uses up. What you bill a customer for a screen is a pricing decision that sits on top of this number. Mixing the two turns the crossover into nonsense, because you would be comparing your charge against a competing method at cost.
My press seconds per piece feel like a guess. How much does that matter?
On short runs, very little — press seconds are multiplied by the quantity, so at 12 pieces a ten second error is two minutes. On long runs it dominates everything else. If you are pricing a 500 piece job, time an actual run with a stopwatch across at least fifty pieces including the pieces where something goes wrong, because the average with the interruptions in it is the number that matters, not the rhythm of a good stretch.
Where should an underbase go?
Count it as a colour. It needs its own screen, its own registration and its own ink on every piece, so it behaves exactly like any other colour in this arithmetic. If you print it and flash it, the flash also lengthens the seconds per piece, which is the other place it shows up.
Does this handle a mixed order with several designs?
No — run it once per design. A job with three different prints is three setups sharing one blank order, and averaging them together hides the fact that the design with twelve pieces on it is carrying a full setup of its own. Running each separately is also the only way to see which design is dragging the job down.