Members Vault: the pricing workbook, tab by tab — with the formulas Members only

Most pricing spreadsheets run forwards. You type a price, they tell you what is left. That is backwards. The price is what you do not know yet; what you know is how much you need to keep. This is the workbook I actually use, tab by tab, with the formulas in it.

Tab 1 — Rates, and the one cell that makes the rest of the file trustworthy

Every rate lives on one tab as a named cell. Nothing else in the workbook types a percentage into a formula.

• fee_transaction — 6.5%. See the caveat in Tab 2.
• fee_processing_pct — 3.0% (US) and fee_processing_fixed — $0.25 per order.
• fee_listing_unit — $0.20. Charged to list, then $0.20 again for each extra unit that listing sells. Ten units on one listing costs $2.00, not $0.20.
• fee_offsite — 15% or 12%. 12% once trailing revenue reaches $10k, and mandatory for the life of the shop from that point on.
• credit_share_save — 4%. A separate credit, not a discount on your transaction fee.
• fee_currency_conv — 2.5%, when listing currency differs from payment-account currency.
• fee_regulatory_op — varies by country. Applies outside the US only.

Above them sits the most important cell in the file: Rules verified: [date], with the source URL beside each rate.

I have not found a paid workbook in this category that carries one. It costs nothing, and it is the only honest way to say how stale a file is. One $5.99 listing with 70 reviews still reads "Updated for April 2022" — since then the shop set-up fee arrived, Share & Save launched, and the 1099-K threshold changed twice.

That last cell prints in a different colour because it is secondary-sourced: I have those percentages from Craftybase, not from Etsy directly. Check those against your own fee statement before you trust them.

Tab 2 — Pricing backwards from what you need to keep

Here is the whole tab in one line:

price = (target net + product cost + shipping you absorb + $0.45) ÷ (1 − transaction% − processing% × (1 + buyer's tax rate))

The $0.45 is the $0.20 listing fee plus the $0.25 fixed processing charge — the two flat lines a pure percentage model silently drops. The (1 + tax rate) is there because Etsy's processing fee is taken from the item's total sale price including shipping and any applicable sales tax. Tax you never touch still widens the base.

Worked, on a print-on-demand shirt:

• Blank plus printing: $12.50
• Shipping I absorb (free shipping to the buyer): $5.20
• What I need to keep: $9.00
• Buyer's state rate: 8.25%

Denominator: 1 − 0.065 − (0.03 × 1.0825) = 0.902525 Numerator: 9.00 + 12.50 + 5.20 + 0.45 = $27.15 Price: 27.15 ÷ 0.902525 = $30.08

Now the shortcut most people use — divide by (1 − 6.5% − 3%), forget the flat lines. That gives $29.50, and at $29.50 you keep $8.47, not $9.00. Fifty-three cents short on every unit sold.

The percentages are the easy part. The denominator is where the money is.

One caveat I will not paper over. I verified against Etsy's own wording that the processing fee base includes shipping and sales tax. I did not verify the base for the 6.5% transaction fee. So in my sheet that base