What embroidery digitizing costs
There are five ways to get a stitch file and they do not cost the same kind of money. One is per file, one is a licence you own, three are a month at a time. Here is each, with the day the number was read off their own page.
Why the prices look so different
A digitizer charges for an hour of their own work, so the price follows how hard the logo is. Desktop software charges once for a tool you keep for years. A browser tool charges a month at a time whether you use it or not. None of them is dearer than the others in the abstract — it depends entirely on how many marks you make in a year.
The number that actually decides it
Work out your files per month, not your price per file. At one file a year, anything with a subscription is bad value and a single paid file wins. At twenty a month, a subscription is cheaper than a person by an order of magnitude. At five hundred a month, the price per file falls to pennies and the only question left is whether the files are good enough to send without checking.
What nobody puts in the price
The hidden cost is the second round. If the file comes back and the lettering has closed up, somebody has to look at it, say so, wait, and try again — and that is a day, not a price. It is also why one browser tool sells a person on top of its own automatic at $19.99 a file: they are charging for the round that the automatic did not finish.
- How much does it cost to digitize a logo?
- A person charges roughly $10–85 per logo and takes a day or two. Browser tools run $9–39 a month. Desktop software that can digitize an illustration starts around $3,995 for a licence you keep. Here it is $9 for one file with no account, or from $0.20 a file on a yearly plan.
- Why do digitizing prices vary so much?
- Because they are not the same product. An hour of a person’s work scales with how hard the logo is; a subscription does not scale at all; a licence is bought once. The only fair comparison is cost per file at the number of files you actually make.
- Is cheap digitizing worse?
- Not automatically — but ask what happens if it comes back wrong. The real cost of a stitch file is the second round, not the first, and a price that does not say who fixes it is not a whole price.
Ours is one file at $9 with no account, or from $0.20 a file on a yearly plan. The whole mark is worked out on screen at the size you asked for before you pay, so a file you do not want costs nothing.