Embroidery
Why embroidery is priced by stitch count
Printing charges you for colours. Embroidery does not care about colours at all — it charges for stitches. Once that clicks, every strange thing about embroidery quotes starts making sense.
The one thing to understand
An embroidery machine sews your design one stitch at a time. The time it takes, the thread it burns and the wear on the machine all scale with how many stitches the design needs. That is the cost.
Colour changes are just the machine swapping thread. A six-colour logo and a one-colour logo of the same size and coverage cost exactly the same. That is the opposite of screen printing, where every colour needs its own screen and colours drive the price hard.
So the instinct people bring from printing is backwards here. Simplifying your logo down to two colours saves you nothing on embroidery. Making it physically smaller, or swapping a solid filled area for an outline, saves you plenty.
What it actually costs
Pricing is banded. Every design from 0 to 5,000 stitches costs the same per piece; the price steps up at each band after that. These are our real numbers — embroidery only, one location, with the garment on top.
| Stitch band | 12 pcs | 24 pcs | 48 pcs | 100 pcs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 – 5,000 | $8.00 | $7.00 | $5.50 | $4.60 |
| 5,001 – 6,999 | $8.50 | $7.50 | $6.00 | $4.80 |
| 7,000 – 9,999 | $9.00 | $8.00 | $6.50 | $5.50 |
| 10,000 – 11,999 | $9.50 | $8.50 | $7.00 | $5.60 |
| 14,000 – 15,999 | $12.00 | $9.50 | $8.00 | $6.50 |
| 18,000 – 19,999 | $14.00 | $11.50 | $10.00 | $8.50 |
Embroidery cost per piece, one location. The blank garment is on top — the calculator below adds it for you. Past 19,999 stitches the price continues per additional thousand.
Two things fall out of that table.
The first band is wide and it is where most work lands. Anything up to 5,000 stitches is the same price, and across an archive of 464 MGE designs, 41% sat inside that first band. A normal left chest logo is comfortably inside it. If your design is in that band, you are already at the cheapest embroidery we do.
Quantity moves the price more than the design does. The same 5,000-stitch logo is $8.00 a piece at twelve and $4.60 at a hundred. Going from a 5,000-stitch logo to a 15,000-stitch one at 24 pieces costs you $2.50 more each; going from 24 pieces to 100 saves you $2.40 each. Ordering more is the bigger lever than simplifying your art.
What actually drives a stitch count up
People assume it is detail or colours. It is neither. It is area and coverage — how much physical fabric ends up under thread.
Size
Stitch count scales with area, and area scales with the square of the size. Make a logo twice as wide and you have roughly four times the area, so roughly four times the stitches. This is the single biggest lever you control. A logo at 3.5 inches instead of 4.5 inches is a materially cheaper logo.
Solid fill versus outline
A filled shape gets sewn edge to edge. The same shape as an outline sews the border only. The outline version can be a fraction of the stitches for a design that reads just as well on a cap.
Small lettering — the expensive surprise
Text is sewn with satin stitch, which lays thread across the width of each letter stroke. That means it consumes thread by the length of the outline, not the area inside it. Small letters have a lot of outline for very little area.
We measured this across our own jobs. Stitches per covered square inch, by how tall the text is:
| Text height | Stitches per covered sq inch |
|---|---|
| Under 0.8″ | about 4,408 |
| 0.8″ – 1.2″ | about 3,186 |
| 1.2″ – 2″ | about 2,530 |
| 2″ – 4″ | about 1,673 |
Measured across 15 verified MGE lettering jobs. For comparison, logo artwork runs around 2,300 stitches per covered square inch and stays flat regardless of size.
Small text is roughly two and a half times denser than large text. A line of tiny lettering under a logo can quietly add more stitches than the logo itself — and it is the part nobody can read on the shirt anyway.
The practical rule: keep lettering at least an inch tall where you can. It costs less, it sews cleaner, and it is actually legible from across a room. Tiny text is the most common way a simple logo ends up in an expensive band.
How to bring your embroidery price down
- Order more. The biggest lever by a distance, as the table shows.
- Size it sensibly. Area scales with the square of the width, so a small reduction goes a long way.
- Outline instead of filling large solid shapes.
- Drop or enlarge tiny lettering. Under an inch it is expensive and hard to read.
- Leave the colours alone. They cost nothing here. Use them.
- Reorder the same design on the same item and you skip the $45 digitizing fee entirely — you are only paying for the sewout.
Price your own embroidery
Would you like to find out your price without the hassle of a phone call or email? This is the same calculator that runs on our quote page, on the same stitch pricing. Tell it the garment, where the logo goes and how many, and it gives you the real number.
What we need from you
Embroidery artwork has to be digitised — turned into a stitch file the machine can read. That is a separate craft from printing artwork, and it is why the same logo can look great printed and need work before it will sew.
Digitizing is $45, and it is the same $45 whether the design is small or large.
You pay it once. Reorder the same design on the same item and there is no digitizing fee again — you pay for the sewout and nothing else. That is the part people do not expect, and it is genuinely the best thing about embroidery: pay once, use the file a million times.
It is charged again in only two situations. The design goes on a different item — shirts, hats and beanies all stitch differently, so each needs its own file. Or you want the design bigger, which means re-digitizing it.
Keep that separate from the artwork fee, which is a different thing entirely: that one applies only if you don’t have print-ready source files. Send the vector and there is no artwork fee. An embroidery order can carry both, one, or neither. More in what we need from your artwork.
Would you like to know exactly which fees your job would carry before you commit to anything? Send us the logo and we will tell you — the link is at the bottom of this page.
Common questions
Does the number of colours change the price?
No. Colour changes are a thread swap. A six-colour logo costs the same as a one-colour logo of the same size and coverage.
How many stitches is a normal chest logo?
Usually under 5,000, which is our cheapest band. 41% of 464 designs in our archive landed inside it.
Why is my small text so expensive?
Satin stitch charges by the length of the letter outline rather than the area inside it. Text under 0.8″ runs around 4,408 stitches per covered square inch against about 1,673 for text 2″ to 4″ tall.
How much is digitizing, and do I pay it every time?
$45, the same for a small or a large design, and you pay it once. Reorder the same design on the same item and there is no digitizing fee again — just the sewout. It only comes back if the design goes on a different item, because shirts, hats and beanies stitch differently, or if you want it bigger.
Can you embroider anything other than caps and shirts?
Yes — caps, shirts, polos, hoodies, bags, towels and jackets, all in house.
Do you do all-over or sublimated designs?
No. See what we don’t print for the full list.
Want the next one?
We publish one of these a week — real numbers off our own price list, no fluff. Would you like to know when the next one goes up? Leave your email and we’ll tell you.
Just new posts. No sales blasts, and you can tell us to stop any time.
Send us the logo and we’ll tell you the stitch count
Before anything runs: what your design will actually sew at, what band it lands in, and what it would cost to bring it down a band if that is worth doing. Black-owned and veteran-owned, in Capitol Heights since 2016.
Would you like to know your real number instead of guessing at it? Click below.
Send your logo for a quote (202) 643-7805