The cartridge set was $130 — so what did that 8×10 just cost?
Put in your sheet size and price, your cartridge set, and the print you're pulling — the calculator nests it on the sheet, meters the ink by the square foot, and adds a waste factor for nozzle cleans and the prints that don't survive. Everything stays in your browser.
The print
The ink
The frame
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, every print you pull draws its paper sheets and ink milliliters down from real inventory, so cost per print, edition pricing, fair inventory value, and your Schedule-C materials all read from one ledger instead of a receipt you're squinting at. See for printmakers & photographers 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 calculator · Art prints & photography
Here's the math this calculator runs, which numbers are settled, and which ones are yours to set.
What does an 8×10 actually cost on a 13×19 sheet?
Two 8×10s nest on a 13×19 with a border margin, so a $2.20 sheet puts $1.10 of paper into each print. A $130 cartridge set holding 126 ml works out to about $1.03 per milliliter; an 8×10 is 80 square inches — roughly 0.56 sq ft — which at 1.5 ml per square foot uses about 0.83 ml, call it 86 cents of ink. Add the default 10% waste factor and that print cost you about $2.16 to pull. Multiply by the run and you know what the whole edition costs to produce.
How can you know how much ink one print uses?
You can't know exactly — published figures run roughly 1 to 2 ml per square foot, and the real number swings with image density and with your printer, which is why this calculator treats it as a setting rather than a constant. The default is 1.5, the middle of that argued range; a dense, dark landscape will drink more than a high-key portrait on the same paper. The old forum ritual — divide the set's price by how many prints it lasted — is honest math too, but it only answers after the set runs dry. Metering by the milliliter lets you estimate before you commit a sheet.
Why is there a waste percentage, and what should mine be?
Because not every sheet that goes in comes out sellable — nozzle cleans burn ink between prints, and a banded or scuffed print eats a whole sheet plus everything laid down on it. Printmakers argue this number anywhere from 10 to 20%; the calculator defaults to 10 and applies it on top of paper, ink, and any printer wear you've added. If your printer sits idle between sessions and cleans hard every time it wakes, nudge it up — your own reprint rate over a few months is the honest answer.
Should the printer itself be in my cost per print?
That's your call, which is why printer wear is an optional field and off by default. Some printmakers treat the machine as overhead their pricing has to recover anyway; others put a few cents per print into cost so each edition quietly pays the printer off. If you turn it on, those cents ride through the same waste multiplier as paper and ink — but the calculator will never force a depreciation schedule on you.