Price Your Digital Product So It Actually Leaves Profit
About Alex: a pen name. There is no shop behind it, and no results are claimed. What follows is arithmetic and opinion, and I'll mark which is which.
In short
Price is what the customer pays. Profit per sale is what is left after every fee and cost that sale triggers, and that smaller number decides how many sales you need. Work it out from your platform's own fee page, not from memory or from someone else's blog. (Starting from the fee page is my opinion; it is also the only place the numbers can be current.)
What you get from reading it:
- A one-page worksheet: profit per sale, margin, sales for a monthly goal, sales to pay back what the product cost to make
- The exact formulas, with an imaginary example recomputed in Python
- A check for "if I cut the price, how many more sales do I need just to stand still?"
You set a price once, probably in a hurry, probably by looking at what similar products charge. Then the first sale arrives and the payout is smaller than the price. By how much? It is easy to glance at it and move on.
That glance is the habit to break, because every later decision rests on the gap. How many sales you need, whether a discount is affordable, whether the evenings you spent making the thing will ever come back as money: all of it runs through profit per sale, not through the price.
This guide does not tell you what price to choose; it shows what a price you are considering leaves you. It goes deeper on one thing only: price, fees and break-even. If you want the wider question of why a shop is stuck (reach, interest, purchase or profit), Why Your Shop Isn't Growing covers it, and its Step 2 introduces profit per order. Here I assume you've met the idea and want to do it properly, for one product.
Who this is for. A seller of digital products (templates, printables, fonts, stickers, planners) on a marketplace or their own site, who knows that price, revenue and profit differ but has never worked it through. If you sell physical goods, the same formulas work, but you'd add materials and delivery to the "other cost" input.
What it costs. Nothing and no software. A notebook or a spreadsheet is enough; a small calculator on this page does the arithmetic if you'd rather type than divide.
A note on fee numbers. I'm not going to quote any platform's percentages. Fee pages may change and may differ by country and plan, and I haven't read yours for you. Copy every number from your platform's own fee page, on the day you do this, and write down the date. The checklist below tells you which kinds of fee to look for.
Two imaginary sellers carry the examples. Sam sells a planner template; Lena sells a very cheap sticker pack. Neither is a real person, and every number attached to them is invented to show the arithmetic.
The six inputs, and where each one comes from
You need six numbers. Four describe one sale, and two describe what you want.
| Input | What it is | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Price | What the buyer pays | Your listing |
| Percent fees | Fees charged as a share of the sale, added together | Your platform's fee page |
| Fixed fee per sale | Fees charged as a flat amount per sale | Your platform's fee page |
| Other cost per sale | Anything else that one sale costs you | Your own records |
| Monthly profit goal | What you want to keep each month | Your choice |
| One-time creation cost | What making the product cost you | Your own records |
"Percent fees" means all the fees that scale with price, added into one percentage. "Fixed fee per sale" means all the flat per-sale amounts, added into one amount. If your platform shows a fee in a different currency, convert it to the currency you price in, and note the rate you used.
A checklist of fee kinds to look for
This is a checklist from my own judgement of fees a seller might be charged somewhere. It is not a statement about any platform: some platforms charge none of these, some charge others. Your fee page decides.
- A transaction or sales fee, may be a percentage of the price
- A payment-processing fee, may be a percentage plus a flat amount
- A listing fee, charged per listing rather than per sale (decide whether to spread it over expected sales, or treat it as part of creation cost)
- Fees on shipping, tax or add-ons, if your platform counts them in the fee base
- Currency conversion or payout fees
- A monthly or yearly plan fee (not per sale; see "Other cost" below)
- Advertising or promotion fees, if you use them
- Anything on the fee page I haven't listed
Read the page slowly. If a fee is described in words you can't turn into a percentage or a flat amount, write it down as unclear and check it against a real payout statement from one of your own sales. Your payout statement is the best test of the fee page, because it shows what was actually taken.
What goes in "other cost per sale"
Anything one more sale costs you, and nothing that you'd pay whether or not the sale happened. For a digital product it can be close to zero: perhaps file-hosting or delivery charges per download, or a share of an advertising spend you can tie to sales.
Put a monthly plan fee here only if you decide to spread it over sales (monthly fee divided by the number of sales you expect that month). That estimate is a guess; mark it as one.
Your own time is not in this input. I'd count it, but separately: the creation cost is where your hours go if you want to price them. Leaving your hours out is a legitimate choice. Pretending they were free is the problem.
The Price Worksheet
Here is the box to copy. The formulas sit below it, so you can check any step.
PRICE WORKSHEET date: ____
Fee page read on: ____
1. Price: $ ____
2. Percent fees (all added): ____ %
3. Fixed fee per sale: $ ____
4. Other cost per sale: $ ____
5. Monthly profit goal: $ ____
6. One-time creation cost: $ ____
A. Profit per sale
= price x (1 - percent/100)
- fixed fee - other cost
= $ ____
B. Margin = profit / price
= ____ %
C. Sales needed for the goal
= goal / profit, round UP
= ____
D. Sales to pay back creation cost
= creation cost / profit, round UP
= ____
Price and profit calculator (stays on this screen; nothing is sent or saved)
- Profit per sale: —
- Margin: —
- Sales needed for the goal: —
- Sales to pay back the creation cost: —
Figure: the same worksheet as a calculator. Type the six numbers; it follows exactly the formulas in the box.
The formulas, written out
profit per sale =
price * (1 - percent_fees/100)
- fixed_fee_per_sale
- other_cost_per_sale
margin = profit / price
sales needed for goal =
ceil(goal / profit)
sales to pay back =
ceil(creation_cost / profit)
"ceil" means round up to the next whole number, because you can't sell 0.3 of a sale and 35.3 sales is not enough. If profit is zero or below, the last two formulas have no answer. Then stop and fix price or costs first: more sales of something that leaves nothing only multiplies nothing.
A few reading notes. The percent applies to the price before the flat amounts come off, which is why the formula multiplies first and subtracts after. If your platform calculates a fee on a base that includes tax or shipping, your real profit will differ slightly from this formula, so check one real payout against your result and adjust the inputs until they agree.
And margin is profit as a share of price, not of cost; a "margin" of 85% means you keep 85 cents of each dollar charged.
A worked example with imaginary numbers
Sam is imaginary. Every figure below is invented to show arithmetic; none of it is a typical result, a benchmark or a claim about any platform, and the percentages are not any real platform's.
Sam sells a planner template and has "read" an imaginary fee page that says: 10% in percent fees (all added together), 0.40 in fixed fee per sale, and Sam estimates 0.60 in other cost per sale. Sam's price is 20.00.
As a practice target Sam imagines 600 a month in profit, and the template took 300 of one-time cost to make (software and bought fonts, say). The goal and cost are for the arithmetic only.
SAM'S WORKSHEET (imaginary)
1. Price: $20.00
2. Percent fees: 10 %
3. Fixed fee per sale: $0.40
4. Other cost per sale: $0.60
5. Monthly profit goal: $600
6. Creation cost: $300
A. 20 x 0.90 - 0.40 - 0.60 = $17.00
B. 17.00 / 20.00 = 85 %
C. 600 / 17 = 35.29 -> 36 sales
D. 300 / 17 = 17.65 -> 18 sales
(All of this was recomputed in Python before it was written.) Check it by hand: 36 sales at 17.00 is 612, which clears 600, and 35 sales would be 595, which doesn't. Eighteen sales is 306 against a creation cost of 300; seventeen is 289, short. That is why rounding up matters.
What the numbers don't say: that Sam will find 36 buyers, or that the product is priced well. They say how many sales this particular price needs for this particular goal, and nothing more.
One more trap: the fixed fee hurts cheap products far more than expensive ones. Lena, also imaginary, prices a sticker pack at 3.00 with imaginary 12% percent fees, 0.30 fixed and 0.50 other cost.
LENA'S PROFIT (imaginary)
3.00 x 0.88 - 0.30 - 0.50 = $1.84
margin: 1.84 / 3.00 = 61 %
for a $200 goal: 200 / 1.84
= 108.7 -> 109 sales
Lena's flat 0.80 takes a bite out of a 3.00 price that Sam's 1.00 doesn't take out of a 20.00 price. A similar fee shape, very different margin. The cheaper the product, the more the flat amounts matter, and that's worth knowing before you decide a bundle is "too expensive".
The price-change check: how many more sales just to stand still?
This is the part I'd run before every discount or price rise. The question: if I cut the price by some amount, how many more sales do I need to make the same total profit as before?
Because total profit = profit per sale × number of sales, standing still means:
new sales needed =
old sales x old profit / new profit
extra sales needed (%) =
(old profit / new profit - 1) x 100
Sam considers cutting 20.00 to 16.00, costs unchanged.
SAM CUTS THE PRICE (imaginary)
new profit: 16 x 0.90 - 0.40 - 0.60
= $13.40
margin: 13.40 / 16 = 83.75 %
old / new: 17.00 / 13.40 = 1.269
=> about 27 % more sales needed
goal 600: 600 / 13.40 = 44.78 -> 45
pay-back: 300 / 13.40 = 22.39 -> 23
A 20% price cut (4.00 off 20.00) takes 3.60 off the profit per sale (17.00 to 13.40), because the 10% fee gives back only 0.40 of the 4.00 and the flat 1.00 stays the same. That needs about 27% more sales just to stand still. The margin barely moved (85% to 83.75%), which is why margin alone can mislead: it stays healthy while the money per sale drops by a fifth.
Going the other way: Sam raises the price to 24.00. New profit is 24 × 0.90 − 1.00 = 20.60. Old over new is 17.00 / 20.60 = 0.825, so Sam could lose up to about 17.5% of sales and still stand still. That's an arithmetic fact, not a prediction that sales will fall by less. Nobody can tell you how buyers will react from these numbers.
Two edge cases
Profit of exactly zero. Suppose the price falls to the point where what is left after the percent fee just covers the flat costs. Sam's break-even price is (0.40 + 0.60) / 0.90 = 1.11. At 1.11 the profit is zero, so no number of sales reaches any goal or pays anything back; the formulas have no answer and the worksheet should say fix price or costs first. Below it, each sale loses money.
A cut that eats most of the profit. Lena cuts 3.00 to 2.00: profit becomes 2 × 0.88 − 0.80 = 0.96, nearly half the old 1.84, so she needs 1.84 / 0.96 = 1.92 times as many sales, about 92% more, to stand still.
Cut to 1.00 and profit is 0.08: the same $200 goal now takes 2,500 sales, and 23 times as many as before.
Cut to 0.90 and profit is −0.008, negative, so every sale loses a little. A cut can be small in the price and ruinous in the profit. The rule: when new profit is zero or below, no extra sales can stand in for it.
So before any cut, write the new profit per sale first. If it's below half the old one, you'd need more than double the sales, and I'd ask what in the listing makes me believe the extra buyers exist.
When to test price, and when to fix the page first
Everything below is my judgement, not a benchmark. I have no source for what sellers usually find, and none of it is a rule of the marketplace.
Price changes are easy to make and hard to read. If you change the price and sales move, you won't know whether the price did it, the season did it, or the traffic did. So the order I'd work in:
- Run the worksheet first. If profit per sale is zero or thin, price or costs are the problem, and a page tweak won't fix it. This is a price (or cost) question, so test a higher price or find a cheaper way to deliver.
- If profit per sale is healthy but visitors don't buy, look at the page before the price. Read it as a first-time buyer would and list the questions it leaves open. Audit Your Product Page in 30 Minutes walks through that. A price cut will not answer an unanswered question.
- If the page answers what a buyer needs and visits are decent, a price test is reasonable. Change only the price, write down the date and the number you'll compare ("orders out of visits"), and do the stand-still check first so you know what result would count.
- If visits are very few, neither a price test nor a page test will tell you much. That is a reach question, and Why Your Shop Isn't Growing shows how to find out.
A price test has a cost you can compute in advance: the stand-still percentage. If a cut needs 27% more sales to break even and your traffic can't plausibly deliver that, the test is a bet you've already priced.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Your profit differs from the payout | A fee or a fee base is missing | Compare to one real payout and add the missing fee |
| Margin is high but profit is tiny | The price is low | Look at profit per sale, not margin alone |
| Profit is negative | Costs exceed price | Fix price or costs first |
| Goal needs more sales than you can imagine | Goal too big or profit too thin | Lower the goal to test the idea, or raise profit |
| Fees changed since you checked | Fee pages can change | Re-read the page and update the date |
Your next step
Fill in the worksheet for one product today, with the fee page open and its date written at the top. If profit is healthy, the next job is the page: Audit Your Product Page in 30 Minutes. If it is thin, price or costs come first. And if you wonder which part of the shop is the weakest, Why Your Shop Isn't Growing shows how to find out. None of this needs a new tool.
Sources and checks
How we checked. No external source was used in this guide: no platform page, statistic or law is cited. Every number is either an invented example or arithmetic. The worked examples were recomputed with Python on 26 October 2026. Sam: profit 17.00, margin 85%, 36 and 18 sales; cut to 16.00: profit 13.40, 45 and 23 sales, about 27% more to stand still; rise to 24.00: profit 20.60, about 17.5% fewer sales to stand still; break-even price 1.11.
Lena: profit 1.84, 109 sales; cut to 2.00: 0.96; cut to 1.00: 0.08, 2,500 sales. Nothing has been tested in a real shop.
Opinion, not fact. The fee-kind checklist, the order of work (worksheet, page, then price), and the "below half the old profit" warning are my judgement.
Unverified. How any platform calculates fees (including whether tax or shipping are in the fee base), and how buyers react to price changes. The viewer's calculator has not yet been compared with real payouts.
What this guide does not claim. That any fee, margin or price is normal, that any imaginary seller existed, that a lower or higher price will raise sales, or that following it will produce profit.