01A question
Handmade, on Etsy, in the hours left after everything else. If that’s you, keep going — this page was written for you.
02The answer
Then you're in the right place.
MakerMargin is built for one kind of seller: the person who makes the thing, packs the thing, and still can’t say what any of it actually paid.
03The promise
We're here to help.
Not with hustle. With arithmetic — your prices, Etsy’s real fees, your materials, your hours — done exactly and shown plainly, so the next decision is yours to make on evidence.
04The method
Set your goals.
Setting a goal is not a platitude. Goal-setting theory rests on thirty-five years of empirical research — summarized by Locke and Latham in American Psychologist, 2002.
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717. Read 15 September 2026.
05The edge
With the right tools, you can stay ahead.
Fees change. Material prices creep. A product that paid you well in March can quietly stop by June. Numbers you actually check are the only ones that stay true.
06Meet MakerMargin
It reads the order file Etsy already gives you, counts every fee off your own statement, subtracts what your materials really cost, and tells you what each product pays you per hour. Then it ranks them, worst first.
Etsy takes $4.06 — about 11% of this sale. Full calculator, with materials and Offsite Ads
The order export Etsy already gives you — no account connection, no passwords, no waiting for API approval.
Build a simple “recipe” per product: materials, packaging, shipping. Update a material price once and every product using it updates.
Per-product and per-month profit after every Etsy fee — plus a tax-ready year-end report your accountant will actually thank you for.
What step 3 looks like, for one product over a month:
Between five different fees and your own material costs, most sellers find out what they really earned once a year — at tax time, the hard way. On a $17 sale, the deductions stack up fast:
Pick one thing you make. Five numbers you already know, and you will get back what it pays you an hour and exactly what would have to move for it to pay what you asked. You set the rate — nobody else gets to decide what your time is worth.
Etsy’s cut is the real one, not an estimate — the same fee engine the app bills against, at rates effective 22 June 2026.
That is $5.06 an hour short of the $25.00 you asked for. An hourly rate has only three inputs you control. Here is where each one would have to land:
All three of these reach the same place. The price is the only one that does not cost you anything to try.
That is one product, from five numbers you already know. MakerMargin does it for every product in your shop from the Etsy export — the fees exact, off your own statement — and ranks them worst-paying first.
Rank my whole shop14-day trial · $12/mo
The fees are documented; what they add up to mostly is not. These are the ones that cost our readers the most money, each with the arithmetic done. You do not need an account to read any of it.
Etsy's 6.5% comes off the shipping you charge, not just the item price. On $6.00 of postage that is $0.39 an order — $280.80 a year at 60 orders a month, on money that only ever passed through.
Read the full guideCross $10,000 in sales over the prior 365 days — Etsy recalculates on the 1st of each month — and the Offsite Ads rate drops from 15% to 12%, while taking part stops being optional. It is a three-point discount on a fee you can no longer refuse, and it holds for the lifetime of the shop even if sales fall back.
Read the full guideAbove about $667 in order value, 15% would exceed the $100 per-order cap, so Etsy charges the cap instead. On a $900 order a flat-15% calculator overstates your fee by $35. If you sell furniture or commissioned work, that error compounds.
Read the full guideListings expire after four months, so one that has never sold costs 3 renewals a year at $0.20. A hundred of them is $60 — small enough to miss on a statement, and the fee is the least of it: a near-duplicate competes with the live listing it was copied from.
Read the full guideEtsy's own Seller Handbook says Star Seller is not a direct search ranking factor. Earning it needs a 4.8 average rating, 95% on-time shipping and 95% of first messages answered within 24 hours, judged over three months — a customer-service project, not an SEO one. Chase it for the reasons it actually pays.
Read the full guideA discount comes out of what is left after fees and materials, not out of revenue. On a $48.00 item that costs $30.00 to make, 20% off takes profit from $12.99 to $4.30 — you would need 3.0 times the orders just to stand still.
Read the full guideNo. You upload the order CSV Etsy already lets you export. Your login stays yours.
Shopify CSV import is on the roadmap right after launch.
Stocksmith is full manufacturing software — bills of materials, lot tracking, multi-channel inventory — priced accordingly. If you need those, buy it. MakerMargin answers one question extremely well: what did you actually make on each sale.
Your data is yours: export everything anytime, delete your account and it's gone. We never sell data.
Start free, upload one export, and see what your last month actually earned.