The file says 8,000 stitches. The customer wants 24 polos.
Type the stitch count off the design file and get run time, thread cost, and a per-piece price before you answer the email. Everything stays in your browser.
The design
Costs & price
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper, the same run draws its thread meters and stabilizer down from your real inventory, so each piece's true cost lands in your ledger right under the price you quoted per garment. See for sewists & embroiderers or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
Free machine embroidery tool
Every number in this calculator gets argued in the embroidery groups. Here is what it assumes, and where you overrule it.
Is $1 per 1,000 stitches actually the going rate?
It's a ritual more than a rate — the figure gets repeated in every machine-embroidery group mostly because it's easy to say out loud. The calculator defaults to it for exactly that reason, but the field is yours, and the minimum charge sits on top because the ritual collapses on small work: an 8,000-stitch left-chest logo prices at $8, which doesn't cover hooping the shirt. Set your own rate and your own floor, and the math follows you instead of the group chat.
Why is machine speed a setting instead of a constant?
Because the dial and the day disagree. Machines run anywhere from 400 to 1,000 stitches per minute on paper, but trims, color changes, and re-hooping pull the real-world average well below whatever the dial reads. The default here is 650 — a middle-of-the-road figure — and the honest number is yours to find: time a few actual runs, divide stitches by minutes, and set it once.
How much thread does a design really use?
The convention runs somewhere around 4 to 7 meters of top thread per 1,000 stitches depending on density and stitch type, so the calculator defaults to 5 m top and 3 m bobbin — both settings, not gospel. On the 8,000-stitch logo that comes to about 40 m of top and 24 m of bobbin, which is roughly 7 or 8 cents off a $6, 5,000-meter cone. Thread is almost never what sinks a quote; it's the twelve-plus minutes of machine time per piece that add up.
So what does the 24-polo job actually come to?
At 650 SPM, an 8,000-stitch design runs about 12.3 minutes per garment — close to five hours of machine time across 24 polos, before you count hooping each one. Materials stay small: call it 8 cents of thread and around 30 cents of stabilizer per piece, whatever your hooping cost really is. At the $1-per-1,000 ritual that's $8 a polo, $192 for the run — and whether $192 is worth an afternoon at the machine is exactly the question this calculator puts in front of you before you hit reply.