Members Vault: what one product costs me to keep alive for a year Members only

Every digital product has two budgets. Almost everyone plans the first one — the hours it takes to build the thing. The second one is the one that decides whether owning it is worth anything: what it costs to keep the file true for the next twelve months while fee pages, tax thresholds and the software underneath all move without asking you. I have never seen anyone publish that second number, so here is mine, with the assumptions on the table.

The bill nobody writes down

There is a fee calculator on Etsy with 70 reviews, in a shop with 27,700 sales, whose own listing copy still says it was updated for April 2022 Etsy fee adjustments. The seller is not lazy. The file simply stopped being maintained, and nothing on the page tells a buyer that.

Here is what moved underneath a file like that in roughly eighteen months:

• Share & Save launched — a 4% instant credit on eligible orders, calculated the same way as the transaction fee, and not available on Offsite Ads orders.
• A one-time shop set-up fee arrived for new shops from September 2024 (reported around $15–$29).
• The 1099-K threshold changed twice and now sits back at more than $20,000 and more than 200 transactions, per the IRS in October 2025.
• The $800 de minimis exemption was suspended on 29 August 2025, and the suspension was extended indefinitely in June 2026. Any POD landed-cost model built before that is wrong on duty.
• The 2026 business mileage rate was set at 72.5 cents.

Five moving facts in one small file, in a year and a half. None of them announced themselves to me.

And one more, which is the whole point of this post. I saw a claim that Etsy's regulatory operating fee increased in June 2026. I could not verify it against Etsy's own pages, so I am not repeating it as fact — and checking cost me the same twenty minutes it would have cost if the answer had been yes. Verification is billed whether or not anything changed.

The ledger for one workbook, one year

My fee-and-profit workbook contains 34 numbers or quoted rules that came from somewhere other than me — Etsy help pages, Etsy's fee policy, IRS releases, the Federal Register. Every one of them is a thing that can quietly become false.

Here is the actual year, in hours. The assumptions are mine and I have marked them so you can swap in your own.

Nineteen hours. Now price them. Not at what you hope your time is worth — at what you would actually pay someone to do this instead:

• At $25/hour: $483 a year, for one product.
• At