Per-color pricing

Per-color pricing is how most screen printing quotes are built: each ink color in a design needs its own screen, its own film positive, and its own pass through the press, so the quote adds a rate, commonly $0.50 to $1.50 per color at typical order sizes, for every color beyond the first. A four-color logo isn't printed once; it's printed four separate times, in careful registration, one color layer at a time.

For buyers, this is the single biggest lever for controlling screen print cost on a design. We've taken a four-color gradient logo down to a clean one-color spot version for a customer's staff shirts and cut their per-shirt price by nearly a third, without the design losing recognizability at arm's length on a hoodie.

Before finalizing artwork for a screen print order, ask your shop to count colors the way its press does — a gradient-heavy full-color image can require simulated process printing with six or more screens, effectively pricing like six separate colors even though it reads as one photo. Simplifying to solid, separated colors is almost always the cheapest path through screen printing.

The mistake buyers make is assuming per-color pricing applies to every decoration method. It's specific to screen printing's screen-per-color mechanics — DTG and DTF print full-color art in a single pass for one flat rate, which is exactly why a busy, multi-color logo often routes to digital printing instead of screens.