DTG pricing: the same print costs about twice as much on a dark shirt

A lot of shops price DTG with one number per print size. A left chest is this much, a full front is that much. That one number is wrong in both directions. It is too high on light shirts and too low on dark ones.

Size is not what drives the cost of a DTG print. What sits under the ink is.

I build PrintGrid and I have run Lamb Screen Printing in San Diego for 25 years. I send DTG out. I do not run a DTG printer, and I will not pretend to you that I do. The numbers in this post are the defaults PrintGrid ships with for DTG. They are starting points. If you run the machine you know things I do not, and the point of the post is to show you which numbers to replace with your own.

DTG is not DTF with the film removed

The two look alike on paper. Both are digital, both need somebody standing there, both burn consumables on every piece.

DTF prints onto film and the film gets pressed onto the shirt. The cost is the sheet, how many transfers fit on it, and press time. The shirt barely matters.

DTG puts ink straight into the shirt, so the shirt matters a great deal. A dark shirt needs pretreat and a white underbase before any color goes down. That is more chemistry, more ink, more passes and more minutes. Price DTG on a DTF grid and every dark shirt goes out underpriced.

Light or dark is the biggest number on the job

Here is the same 10 by 12 inch front print on PrintGrid's defaults.

Same art. Same size. About 2.4 times as much going into the price, before a dollar of margin.

The last three rows are what PrintGrid builds the price from: materials with the misprint allowance and a 15% markup, and labor at $25 an hour. Your margin goes on top, and the shirt is separate. The gap holds at every size on the default grid: about 2.1 times on a 4 by 4 left chest and about 2.5 times on a 12 by 16.

Average those into one price per size and you lose money on every dark order while quoting yourself out of the light ones.

Cotton or blend moves the pretreat

Blends take pretreat less efficiently than 100% cotton. PrintGrid's default adds 20% to the pretreat cost when you switch the Fabric setting from Cotton to Blend. It only touches dark prints, because light prints skip pretreat entirely.

In the example above the dark print's materials go from $2.15 to $2.25. A dime a print. It is small on one order, but it is on every dark blend you print all year, and the calculator only knows about it if you flip the switch.

Pretreat labor depends on how you work

The default is 0.75 minutes of labor per dark shirt. That assumes you batch: 30 minutes to pretreat 40 shirts works out to 0.75 minutes each. If you pretreat one shirt at a time at the press, use 1.5 to 2 minutes instead.

One detail people miss. Pretreat is a per-shirt step, not a per-print step. A front and a back on the same dark shirt gets pretreated once, and PrintGrid charges it once.

Misprints belong in the price

DTG loses prints to clogged nozzles, banding and pretreat problems. The typical rate is 3 to 5%, and PrintGrid's default allowance is 4%.

It pads the ink, the pretreat, the labor and the printer time. It does not cover the ruined shirt itself, so price that separately if you eat it.

When DTG shares a building with a press

Everything above is the direct cost of the print. If you run DTG alongside screen printing, there is also rent, insurance and the rest of the monthly nut.

In PrintGrid's Multi-Service Mode every minute a job takes carries its share of that overhead, hands-on minutes and printer minutes together. On the defaults a light 10 by 12 ties up about 2.9 minutes and a dark one about 4.7. So the dark shirt does not only cost more in ink. It also carries about 1.6 times the overhead, because it holds the printer and the operator that much longer. With overhead in the price, the whole gap between light and dark lands somewhere between those two numbers, 1.6 and 2.4, depending on how heavy your overhead is.

That is the part a flat price per size can never see.

Set it to your shop

The defaults assume a mid-grade machine. A faster industrial printer will come in under these times and an entry-level one well over. Ten minutes with a stopwatch and your last ink invoice will get you real numbers:

• Ink cost per print, for each size, light and dark
• Printer minutes per print, for each size, light and dark
• Pretreat cost per dark shirt
• Pretreat labor, print labor and cure time
• Your real misprint rate

Every one of those is a field you can edit.

Where it lives in PrintGrid

1. Open the gear menu and choose Edit Services.
2. Tick DTG and save.
3. Click the DTG tab.
4. Set the Fabric switch to Cotton or Blend.
5. Open Production in the sidebar and enter your own numbers.

There is a walkthrough of each service's settings, DTG included, in tutorial video 6.

DTG is included in PrintGrid. It is not an add-on.

Questions on any of this, hit me direct at ryan@printgrid.ink. Always happy to walk through the math on a call.