Know your true cost per bar or candle — and what to charge wholesale and retail.
Every ingredient that goes into one batch. Amounts update the batch cost live.
Updates instantly as you edit the calculator above.
Save a recipe to reload, duplicate, or print later. Free plan keeps your most recent one.
A clean, printable one-page breakdown — handy for wholesale conversations or your own records.
The cost per bar depends on your oils, lye, fragrance, and colorant, plus a share of packaging, labour, and overhead. Most cold-process soapmakers land somewhere between $2 and $6 per bar once every ingredient and minute of labour is counted. Use the calculator above to plug in your own recipe and get an exact number instead of guessing.
Start by totaling your true cost per candle — wax, fragrance oil, wick, vessel, packaging, labour, and a small overhead allowance — then apply a markup. A common approach is wholesale at 2x cost and retail at 2.5–3x cost, which covers your time and leaves room for craft fairs, wholesale accounts, and slower months.
Most handmade soap sellers use a 2–3x markup over their true production cost: roughly 2x for wholesale and 2.5–3x for direct retail sales. That markup isn't pure profit — it needs to cover packaging, labour, marketplace fees, returns, and the occasional failed batch.
Yes. Unpaid labour is the single biggest reason handmade sellers underprice their work and eventually burn out. Even a modest hourly rate, many makers start around $15–20 an hour, turns a break-even hobby into a business that can actually sustain itself. This calculator lets you toggle labour on or off so you can compare both numbers honestly.
Divide total batch cost by candles per batch to get your cost per candle. From there, wholesale price = cost x 2 and retail price = cost x 3 is the industry-standard starting point, giving roughly 50–65% gross margin at wholesale and 65–70% at retail. Adjust the multipliers up if your market supports premium pricing, or down carefully if you're just testing demand.
Wholesale is the price you charge shops and stockists who then resell your product themselves at their own markup, typically around 2x your true cost. Retail is the price your own customers pay directly, at markets, craft fairs, or your online shop, typically around 3x cost, since you're covering all of the selling effort yourself.