Guide
What to charge per square foot for UV printing
This is the question every new shop asks and the one the internet answers worst. What you can charge depends on your city, your material, your finish, your run lengths and what the shop two streets away is doing — so the useful thing is not somebody else’s number, it is knowing your own cost well enough to price against anyone.
First
Why there is no rupee figure on this page
A rate that is healthy in one city is loss-making in another and leaves money on the table in a third. It moves with the material — printing a rigid panel is not printing flex banner — with the finish, with whether white is laid down, and enormously with run length, because setup time does not care that the job is small.
So a published national rate is either a guess or an advertisement. We are not going to add one, for the same reason we publish no machine price and no ink price per litre: a number that is wrong for most readers is worse than no number, because it gets used.
The method
Seven costs, then a margin
Machine cost per hour
Take what the machine cost, decide over how many years you are writing it off, and divide by the hours you realistically expect to run it — not the hours in a year. A machine running four hours a day carries twice the hourly burden of one running eight.
Ink
The one everyone guesses. Measure it rather than accepting a published figure: weigh or gauge a cartridge, run a known area at your normal settings, and measure again. White changes the answer more than anything else — a job with a white base can use several times the ink of the same artwork without it.
Media
Your actual purchase cost per sheet or per running metre, converted to the same unit as everything else, and including the offcut you cannot sell.
Labour
Not just the operator standing at the machine. File preparation, jigging, loading, unloading, finishing and packing are all paid time, and on short runs they are most of the job.
Waste and reprints
The cost almost every shop leaves out. Track what percentage of your output gets rerun for any reason and add it as a percentage on top. If you do not know the number, start by measuring it for a month.
Power, rent, everything else
Overhead per productive hour: electricity, rent, extraction, maintenance, consumables that are not ink, and the reserve for a printhead you will eventually replace.
Then, and only then, margin
Margin goes on top of a known cost. Margin applied to a guess is a guess.
Units
Work in square metres, quote in square feet
Every machine specification on this site — and every machine specification anywhere — is quoted in square metres per hour. Indian customers ask for a rate per square foot. Do the costing in square metres, where your speed figures already live, and convert once at the end.
The conversion
1 m² = 10.76 sq ft
So a cost per square metre divided by 10.76 gives cost per square foot. Converting in the other direction by mistake is a common and expensive slip — it makes a job look about eleven times cheaper than it is.
Mistakes
Four ways shops underprice themselves
Quoting on ink alone
Ink is rarely the largest cost per square foot. Machine burden and labour usually are, and a rate built on ink plus a guess will not cover them.
Pricing a short run like a long one
Setup, jigging and file prep are nearly fixed per job. Ten square feet costs far more per square foot than a thousand, and a flat rate loses money at the small end.
Forgetting white
A white base changes ink consumption and often pass count too. If your rate card does not distinguish work with white from work without, one of the two is mispriced.
Matching a competitor without knowing their setup
A shop with a paid-off machine, cheaper media and no reprints can be profitable at a rate that would bankrupt you. Their number tells you nothing about your business.
Next
Two things that make this concrete
Measure your ink properly
The method takes an afternoon and gives you a number that is actually yours, rather than one copied from a page that invented it. How to calculate ink cost per square metre.
Put the machine cost in
The payback calculator runs on your own figures, in your browser, with nothing prefilled and nothing stored. Payback calculator.
If you want a sanity check on a rate you have worked out, send it with the assumptions behind it. We will tell you where it looks thin — which is more useful than us handing you a figure that was never about your shop.
Next step
Tell us what you print
Tell us what you print and how much of it, and we will recommend the machine that fits.
Machines are sold in configurations, so the specification decides the price. Tell us the material and the volume and we will quote the exact build.