How screen printing shops can price vector cleanup without losing profit.

A customer walks in with a phone photo of a trucker hat, tells you they want that exact logo on fifty shirts, and your art department quietly groans. That flattened, low-resolution image needs a full redraw before it can go anywhere near a screen, and whatever flat art fee you have charged for years was never built with this particular job in mind. At VectorWiz, in-house designers handle this exact problem for print shops all day — and every upload is priced before billable work starts.

Why a flat art fee loses money on screen printing jobs

Most shops charge one flat number for art prep because it is simple at the counter, and most artwork-prep pricing gets built around whatever job feels typical rather than what a specific file needs. A solid-color wordmark and a six-color vintage badge with halftone shading are not the same job. Treating screen-printing art department fees as one flat line means one job is overpriced while the other quietly bleeds you dry.

A clean vector logo a customer already owns might take five minutes to check. A blurry photo of a mascot with gradient shading can eat an hour, and if your fee was built around the easy job, the hard one is where profit disappears without anyone noticing.

What actually decides how much a vector cleanup job should cost

Price should follow the work, not the file name. These six factors are what move a job from a quick check to a full redraw:

• Color count — one color and six-color separations are simply different amounts of labor.
• Source quality — a crisp high-resolution file pulls a job toward the cheap end; a torn scan or grainy photo pushes it toward the expensive end, because the designer has to reconstruct detail rather than trace it.
• Geometric complexity — fine mascot fur or ornate script takes longer to draw clean than a basic mark.
• Type treatment — standard fonts are quick; custom hand lettering or distressed type has to be redrawn stroke by stroke.
• Workflow specificity — a plain vector file is one thing, but a job needing full spot-color separations, underbase prep, or halftone setup for a specific press is genuinely more labor.
• Redraw vs reillustration — whether the source can be redrawn or has to be rebuilt from a rough reference changes the whole scope of the job.

Flat fee or tiered fee when pricing vector cleanup?

Jobs vary this much, so a tiered structure protects your margin far better than one flat number ever will. Here is how the two approaches actually play out on real jobs.

A tiered system takes a minute longer at the counter because someone has to actually look at the art before quoting it, and that tradeoff is worth naming honestly rather than pretending tiered pricing is free. What it buys back is margin, since a tiered structure stops the six-color mascot job from silently subsidizing itself out of your profit the way a flat fee always does.

How to explain a tiered price without losing the customer

The moment a customer notices two friends paid different art fees, the questions start, and the answer that holds up is showing them why rather than just stating the number. Pull up the source file next to a clean example and point at what actually changed: the color count, the missing separations, the fact that a photo has to be redrawn while a vector file just needs checking.

Keeping the same tier boundaries every time, rather than adjusting them by customer or by mood, is what makes the system feel fair instead of arbitrary once regulars start comparing notes. If a customer pushes for a discount on a job that is genuinely a higher tier, holding the line matters more than it seems, since one quiet exception becomes the price every customer after them expects.

Do reorders and rush jobs need a new art fee?

Not automatically. Once a design has been vectorized and approved, running it again for a reorder is a production decision, not a new art job, so charging the art fee twice on an unchanged file is one of the fastest ways to lose a repeat customer's trust. A new art charge only belongs on a reorder if the design itself changes — a new colorway, added text, a different placement that needs a fresh separation.

Rush requests are a separate lever entirely. A customer trying to jump the queue is not paying for more color count; they are paying to skip ahead of everyone else. A percentage-based rush surcharge on top of the normal art fee tends to hold up better than trying to fold urgency into the base price itself.

How VectorWiz sets its own tiers without guessing

Every upload is graded against the six factors above and lands on one of four tiers before billable work starts. The price is shown instantly at upload and locked at checkout. If a job creeps in scope once work is underway, that becomes a new quote rather than a surprise line item. The full rubric, with examples, is on complexity tiers.

Tier 1 — $19

Simple single-color work with clean source art: a solid wordmark or a basic monogram. 5 credits on a subscription.

Tier 2 — $57

Moderate multi-color work, three to five colors with basic gradients — the range a sports-team logo or a four-color sign panel usually falls into. 15 credits on a subscription.

Tier 3 — $114

Intricate detail or six or more colors: a shaded mascot or a vintage badge with several separations to keep track of. 30 credits on a subscription.

Tier 4 — $190

Full reillustration, where the source is really just a reference and the designer is drawing from scratch — the tier that covers complex stitch maps or mural prep. 50 credits on a subscription.

What about jobs that fall between two tiers?

Not every job lands cleanly. A logo with four colors and slightly rough art might sit between a Tier 1 and Tier 2 job, and the honest move is to round to the nearest tier rather than inventing a Tier 1.5 nobody can explain later. When a job is on the bubble, rounding down toward the customer is usually right, since a shop that nickels and dimes borderline jobs trains customers to distrust every quote that follows. This occasionally means eating a few extra minutes of labor, which is simply part of running a fair pricing system.

Does outsourcing vector cleanup actually change the math?

Outsourcing artwork cleanup changes the math more than most shops expect, especially on the weeks when press time matters more than art time. Sending files to VectorWiz means the tier and price are set before anyone touches the job, so the shop can quote a firm number immediately instead of waiting on an artist to get to it between press runs.

Standard turnaround is 24 hours, Rush is 12 hours for a +50% surcharge, and Flex is 3 business days for a 10% discount. Every order includes layered, print-ready AI, EPS, SVG, and PDF, with DXF or a shop-specific format on request, and there are no setup fees. Free revisions until the file is production-correct; if a delivered file is not, VectorWiz remakes it free.

Shops running steady volume can skip per-job pricing and move to a credit plan, where a Tier 1 job costs 5 credits, Tier 2 costs 15, Tier 3 costs 30, and Tier 4 costs 50. Starter is $399 a month for 130 credits with rollover up to 390 credits. Pro is $799 a month for 380 credits with rollover up to 1140 credits and a dedicated account designer. Full plan math is on pricing.

A shop only sending in the occasional tricky job is usually better off staying per-job. Once cleanup work is a weekly habit, a subscription starts working out cheaper than paying tier by tier. It is also worth knowing that a design headed for both a screen and an embroidery machine is not one job — it is two, since the file prep for spot-color separations and the file prep for a stitch map are different disciplines with their own tier and price. See vector conversion for screen printing and embroidery digitizing.

Price cleanup work without the guesswork

The shops that protect their margin are the ones that stop charging every job the same, whether that means building tiers in-house or handing the variability to a desk that already prices it that way. If a job is sitting in the queue right now, uploading it gives a tiered quote instantly, locked before any work begins. For shops running enough volume to want one predictable monthly number instead of per-job pricing, a credit plan does the same job at scale. Either way, email hello@vectorwiz.com for a bulk batch or a custom quote.

Naimur Rahman

Creative Head

Leads design direction and quality at VectorWiz. Reviews and redraws production artwork by hand across sign, screen-print, embroidery, and CNC work.

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