Price yard signs, banners and decals from your own shop costs
Your shop's costs go in once, and from then on every sign order is priced from your own rate and machine time.
- Know what a shop hour really costs you Rent, power, insurance, software and every wage, yours included, become one break-even rate per billable hour.
- Price the design and print time, not just the vinyl Materials with waste, design, printing, mounting, installs and bought-in channel letters each get their own line.
- Quote by the piece at every quantity One quote shows the order total and the price each at your main quantity and three others, so a customer asking for 10 or 250 gets an answer on the spot.
- Get paid for the proofs and setups Proof rounds, redrawing a flat JPEG logo and loading the printer sit on a checklist that has to be answered before the quote is ready.
- Send a clean quote with quantity breaks A one-page customer quote with your price breaks, deposit and sign shop terms, ready to print or save as a PDF.
- See which sign jobs made money The Job Log tracks every quote, won or lost, and the hours each job really took.
- One-time payment, no subscription
- Instant download
- Excel and Google Sheets
How it turns vinyl, substrate and printer time into a quote with price breaks
The file has six tabs: you set up the shop once, keep your supplier prices fresh, and build one quote per order.
- Start HereThe order to set up your shop, machines and vinyl prices in, about an evening's work.
- Shop SetupThe yearly overhead, your people and each machine (design computer, wide-format printer, plotter, router, install truck), turned into a break-even rate and a cost per running hour for each machine.
- Price ListWhat you pay for coroplast, aluminum and MDO, printable and cut vinyl, laminate, ink, stakes and grommets, each with the date you last checked it.
- QuoteMaterials per piece, the setup and minutes per piece on each machine, outside work like raceways or a subcontract installer, and the checklist. It prices the order at four quantities side by side.
- Customer QuoteThe page your customer sees: the quantity breaks, price each, order total and terms.
- Job LogOnce the signs are out the door, the real hours go in, so you know if the job made money.
What is a break-even rate? It is what one billable hour in your shop has to bring in to pay every wage and every overhead bill, before any machine time or profit. The printer and router hours are added on top at their own cost, and anything charged above all that is profit. The true hourly rate guide walks through it.
Prefilled example built-in
The file comes filled in with a made-up sign shop and its $1,268.50 yard sign quote, so you see a finished quote before you type in your own numbers.
The example shop is an owner, a designer and a production and install person, with a break-even of $57.99 per billable hour. Its sample order is 50 yard signs for a real estate office: 18 x 24 inch 4mm coroplast, full colour both sides, with H-stakes.
| A | B | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Part of the price | Amount |
| 2 | Materials, design, print and mounting | $648.93 |
| 3 | Easy-to-miss costs | $182.46 |
| 4 | Markup, cushion and profit | $437.11 |
| 5 | Price for 50 signs | $1,268.50 |
That is $25.37 a sign. The same quote prices 10 signs at $50.95 each and 250 at $20.25 each, because the design hour, the printer setup and the proofs happen once whatever the quantity. The $437.11 is kept after every cost, the owner's wage included, and the job earns about $112.87 per labour hour. The full walk-through is on how to price signs.
$182
That is what the easy-to-miss lines alone added to this one example quote. It is about 3 times what the calculator costs. Miss them once and the file has paid for itself.
- One-time payment, no subscription
- Instant download
- Excel and Google Sheets
Why a square foot price misses the hours a sign takes
A lot of sign shops price by the square foot, and the number usually comes from a competitor or an online printer. The trouble is that area only measures the face of the sign. It knows nothing about the logo that needs redrawing, the third proof, the grommets or the rounded corners.
Take a small order. A 10 sign run and a 50 sign run of the same yard sign both need the same design hour and the same printer setup. On 50 signs that hour is spread thin. On 10 it is a big share of the price. In the example, that is why one sign costs about twice as much in a run of 10 as in a run of 50, even though the area per sign is the same.
The calculator prices your hours and materials first and only then shows the price each and the price per square foot. You can still compare that to the market, but now you know what your number covers.
Proof rounds, flat JPEG logos and the other sign costs it catches
Before the Quote tab marks a quote ready, each of these needs a Yes, No or N/A:
- Proof rounds and customer changes, which take as long the third time as the first.
- Redrawing customer artwork that shows up as a flat JPEG or a photo of a business card.
- Colour matching and test prints before the real run.
- Loading media, printer setup and head cleaning, once per job.
- A reprint allowance for the botched print or the bad cut.
- Travel time to install or deliver. Left as No in the example on purpose, so the warning stays until you set your own number.
Exactly what you get
One spreadsheet file, sent as an instant download after checkout. It opens in Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. There is no subscription, no login and no app.
- The six-tab calculator, ready for your shop's numbers.
- A complete example sign shop, with a finished 50 yard sign quote at four quantities.
- Sign shop customer terms you can edit, covering proof limits, approving the size, re-quoting changes after approval and a deposit before materials are ordered.
- A Job Log that shows your win rate and where hours ran over. In the example, a cafe sign quoted at 14 hours took 21. Job costing shows how to use that.
How it compares
Most owners price a job one of these ways. Here is what each one gives you.
| Copying another company's price | A free estimate template | Estimating software | This calculator | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starts from your own costs | No | No | Varies | Yes |
| Makes you answer the easy-to-miss costs | No | No | Varies | Yes |
| Shows which jobs made money | No | No | Varies | Yes |
| Works in Excel and Google Sheets | – | Yes | No | Yes |
| Cost | Free | Free | Usually a monthly fee | $49.95 once |
Who it's for: small sign shops with printers, plotters and routers
It fits owner-run sign shops of about 1 to 15 people making yard signs, banners, panels, decals, vehicle lettering and some fabrication. One-person shop or a crew with an install truck, runs of 250 or a single routed sign, it works the same way, because every hour, machine and price in it is your own. Want to check your rate first? Try the free true hourly rate calculator.
It is not for shops already running full estimating software with a finished price book, for anyone who wants a list of retail sign prices, or for brokers who never make anything in-house. The machine section would sit empty for them.
Stop pricing signs from a square foot number you copied. Price every order from your own shop rate and machine time, catch the proofs and setups that go unbilled, and see which jobs made money.
Sign Shop Pricing Calculator
$49.95 one-time
Buy now and download- One-time payment, no subscription
- Instant download
- Excel and Google Sheets