Printify is free in a couple of ways. There’s a free Printify Pop Up Store and a normal Printify account that can be integrated with ecommerce marketplaces or platforms like Etsy or Shopify.
Opening a Printify account is free, and so is listing products. Printify say it themselves: using the platform is free of charge and you can publish as many designs as you want. There is also a paid Premium plan, I’ll cover that in just a bit.
You pay Printify when an order comes in, and that per item cost is the real answer to what Printify costs you. Right now a t-shirt runs $9.50 to $12.41 and a hoodie $21.58, before shipping.
What You Pay, and When
| Product | Type | Item cost | Shipping | Cost per order |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gildan 5000 Printify Choice | T-Shirt | $9.50 | $3.99 | $13.49 |
| Gildan 64000 Printify Choice | T-Shirt | $9.88 | $3.99 | $13.87 |
| Bella + Canvas 3001 Printify Choice | T-Shirt | $11.29 | $3.99 | $15.28 |
| Comfort Colors 1717 Printify Choice | T-Shirt | $12.41 | $3.99 | $16.40 |
| Gildan 18000 Printify Choice | Sweatshirt | $17.87 | $7.39 | $25.26 |
| Gildan 18500 Printify Choice | Hoodie | $21.58 | $7.39 | $28.97 |
Prices verified September 9, 2026 and refreshed again on the first of every month.
Printify Choice auto-selects a print provider per order, so confirm the cost in your own account before pricing a product.
There is no monthly minimum, no listing fee and that is the genuine appeal of print on demand.
The Free Plan Is a Real Plan, Not a Trial
If you sign up for a Printify account, you’re automatically on the free plan forever. You do, however, need to have a credit card ready to pay for any orders that come in. So it’s free to start and build your print on demand business, but you need to have some funding ready to pay for order fulfillments.
You pay the supplier (Printify) before you get paid by the marketplace or whichever ecommerce platform you choose. Ecommerce paltforms hold funds and release them on their own schedule, while Printify charges your card the moment the order goes to production. On your first sales, that gap comes out of your own pocket. You have to be ready for it, because sometimes the funds could be held for more than 30 days.
- 5 stores per account
- Unlimited product designs
- Integration with Shopify, Etsy, eBay and others
- 24/7 merchant support
- Merchant Protection, which covers a reprint or refund on a manufacturing error
Is Printify Pop Up Store Free?
This is the free way to start a print on demand business. You sign up for a Printify account, add a Pop Up Store, and start adding your designs. Whatever sales you bring in, Printify sends you the profits every month.
This is best choice! Right?
It comes down to a couple things. How much of a community have you already built? Are you able to drive organic traffic to your store? And on the aesthetics side of things, how customizable do you need your store to be?
Printify Pop Up Stores are perfect for POD sellers who want less headaches of store building and logistics, so that they can focus on bringing in traffic and sales. There are a few templates to choose from and the stores look decent. It’s your design that’s going to close the deal, not how pretty the site is.
Premium is the paid tier for Printify users that sell on other platforms. It is $39 a month, or $24.99 a month billed yearly. It buys you a discount on product costs, up to 20% off all products and up to 33% on new ones, plus 10 stores instead of 5 and some extras like mentorship, and AI mockups.
The discount is the part worth doing maths on, and it is not a flat 20% in practice. Across the blanks I track it lands anywhere between 13.6% and 28.9% depending on the product, which changes the answer completely depending on what you sell.
This is the question nobody answers, so here it is per product.
| Product | You save per item | Discount | Orders a month to break even (monthly) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gildan 18500 Hoodie | $5.69 | 26.4% | 7 |
| Gildan 18000 Sweatshirt | $5.17 | 28.9% | 8 |
| Gildan 5000 T-Shirt | $2.24 | 23.6% | 18 |
| Bella + Canvas 3001 T-Shirt | $2.25 | 19.9% | 18 |
| Gildan 64000 T-Shirt | $1.97 | 19.9% | 20 |
| Comfort Colors 1717 T-Shirt | $1.69 | 13.6% | 24 |
Based on a subscription of $39.00 a month, monthly. Item savings come from the live price data, so these figures move when supplier pricing does. Shipping is not included, because Premium discounts the product rather than the postage.
And on the yearly plan, which is the one that actually makes Premium defensible:
| Product | You save per item | Discount | Orders a month to break even (yearly billed) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gildan 18000 Sweatshirt | $5.17 | 28.9% | 5 |
| Gildan 18500 Hoodie | $5.69 | 26.4% | 5 |
| Gildan 5000 T-Shirt | $2.24 | 23.6% | 12 |
| Bella + Canvas 3001 T-Shirt | $2.25 | 19.9% | 12 |
| Gildan 64000 T-Shirt | $1.97 | 19.9% | 13 |
| Comfort Colors 1717 T-Shirt | $1.69 | 13.6% | 15 |
Based on a subscription of $24.99 a month, yearly billed. Item savings come from the live price data, so these figures move when supplier pricing does. Shipping is not included, because Premium discounts the product rather than the postage.
Prices verified September 9, 2026 and refreshed again on the first of every month.
Read those two tables together and the pattern is obvious. What you sell matters more than how much you sell. Seven hoodie orders a month covers the monthly plan. It takes twenty four Comfort Colors tees to do the same job, because the discount on that shirt is half what it is on the hoodie.
If you sell sweatshirts and hoodies, Premium starts paying at a volume most part time sellers reach. If you sell cheap tees, you need real volume before it is anything but a monthly bill.
The Mistake to Avoid
Do not subscribe because the discount percentage sounds big. Twenty percent off a $9.50 shirt is $1.90, and $39 divided by $1.90 is a number of orders you may not be making yet. Work out what you actually sold last month, multiply by the saving on those exact products, and compare it to the fee. If you have not sold anything yet, the answer is the free plan.
The shipping side is worth knowing too, because Premium discounts the product and not the postage, and Printify orders can split across facilities. I covered how that works in does Printify combine shipping on multiple items.
Work It Out on Your Own Product
Printify’s cost is only one line in the sum. The platform you sell on takes a cut as well, and on Etsy that is $9.95 on a $100 sale before advertising. Put your own numbers in the Etsy profit calculator or the Shopify one and both sides are handled for you.
For how Printify compares to the others on cost, the full picture is on what print on demand actually costs.
