When Our $7 Press Fee Stops Being the Cheap Option

There are two ways to buy a printed shirt from us, and we quote them differently. Either we press it for you and charge a flat fee per print location, or we sell you the transfer and you press it yourself. Both prices are on the site. What isn't on the site — anywhere, from us or anyone else — is the arithmetic showing where one overtakes the other.

So here it is, using our live prices. Including the part where our own fee stops being the better deal.

The two prices

If we press it, you pay for the blank plus a flat per-location fee:

That fee is all-in. It covers printing the film, powdering, curing, pressing and inspecting. There is no separate setup fee, no design fee and no minimum order. The fees stack with no bundle discount — front plus back plus one sleeve is $7 + $7 + $3 = $17 on top of the blank.

One thing worth stating plainly, because it confuses people constantly: the price you see on a Custom T-Shirt product page is the blank garment only. Print is never included in it. A small black Gildan 5000 blank is $2.60. With a front print it's $9.60.

If you press it yourself, you buy the shirt and a transfer sized to your design instead. A full-front 11.5×11.5 transfer is $5.29. A left-chest-sized 6×6 is $1.44.

The detail almost nobody notices

Our press fee is flat. It is $7 for a front print whether you order one shirt or four hundred. It never discounts.

Transfers do discount — steeply, and automatically in the cart:

Which produces a result most people get backwards. Buying in bulk does not make our press service more competitive. It makes it less competitive, because one side of the comparison is falling and the other is standing still.

The actual crossover, full-front print

Comparing our $7 front fee against an 11.5×11.5 transfer at $5.29, with the discount tier that a run of that size would actually land in:

Read the last column as a budget, not as profit. It is the amount of money that pressing the run yourself frees up — and therefore roughly what a press would have to cost, once, before the decision pays for itself.

At a dozen shirts, that budget is $33. It does not buy a heat press, and we would rather you didn't try. At a hundred shirts on one front print, it is $462, and the conversation is completely different.

Small prints are a different story

The chest and pocket fee is $3, and a 6×6 transfer starts at $1.44. The gap is narrower, and it stays narrower:

Two honest observations. The $3 locations are the better value in our fee structure — you're getting the same press labor for less than half the front-print price. And the $7 front fee is where our margin lives. On a large single-location front run, that is the number a customer with a press should be looking at hardest.

What the savings column leaves out

The tables above compare money, not work. Pressing your own shirts means you own the outcome: the time, the space, the electricity, and the misfires. A scorched shirt is your cost, not ours. Alignment on a hundred shirts is genuinely tedious, and a run pressed at 11pm the night before an event tends to look like it.

There is also a quieter cost. When we press, you get one price per finished shirt and we absorb the reprints. When you press, the transfer is cheap but the blank underneath it isn't free, and every ruined shirt costs you the garment too.

So treat the savings column as the ceiling on what DIY is worth, not the expected result.

Straight recommendations

• Under about 20 shirts, let us press them. The savings are $33 or less. Buying equipment to capture that is a bad trade, and there is no minimum order here — one shirt is a real order.
• You already own a press? Buy transfers, at any quantity. Even at a single piece you're $1.71 ahead on a front print, and the gap only widens.
• 20 to 75 shirts, no press. This is the genuine grey zone. $85 to $295 in savings is real money but not obviously press money — especially if it's a one-time job.
• Over 100 shirts, repeatedly, single front print. This is where the flat fee works against you. Either buy transfers, or talk to us — if you're running that volume through the $7 fee every month, we should be having a different conversation about your pricing.
• Multi-location work stays with us longer. Front, back and a sleeve is $17 of fee, but it's also three separate press cycles and three alignments per shirt. The labor you're taking on scales faster than the money you're saving.

Either way

Both routes get free pickup at our Dallas and Fort Worth locations, and both can be rushed for a flat $20. If you're not sure which side of the line your job falls on, send us the design and the quantity and we'll run the same math on your actual numbers — including when the answer is that you should press it yourself.

If you're mainly here for the quantity breaks, we've written those up separately in bulk discount cliffs, which covers why ordering 21 transfers can cost less than ordering 20.

Prices in this article are our live catalog prices at the time of writing. Blank and transfer prices move; the product pages are always authoritative.