Understanding Commercial Printing Costs

One of the toughest things that people have understanding when they are ordering printing for the first time are the dynamics of how a printing job is estimated for cost. This plays a major role in the decision of how much of one particular thing to order such as a brochure, stationery letterhead, business cards, newsletters, catalogs, and other items.
When a person gets an estimate back for the first time they usually are surprised at what the first hundred or 1000 copes costs versus the next 1000. Printing processes that use plates, such as offset and flexography, have relatively high unit costs for the first few hundred copies; however, unit costs drop sharply as run lengths increase. This is because the cost of the plates and the setup required to make those plates is a fixed cost. This cost gets spread across the job and thus makes the units costs go down as more brochures or newsletters are ordered.
If you want to save some money on the set up and do not have a large quantity to order, then a direct digital solution may appeal to you. With digi­tal printing, unit costs stay almost identical regardless of run length. If you need less than 1,000 copies, digital printing will generally have low­er unit costs than using a press that needs plates.
Inexperienced print buyers often feel tempt­ed to reduce unit costs by increasing run lengths. The brochure that costs $2.00 each for 1,000 copies may cost $1.75 each for 2,000 copies and $1.45 each for 5,000 copies. This is easy to do if one is trying to get a “good deal”. Just because you save $.55 per unit by ordering 5,000, you may not need that many brochures and thus be wasting your valuable budget money. To keep costs in perspective, figure out the cost for the entire job as well as for each unit. After that, ask yourself how many units you will really need during the useful life of the brochure, newsletter, letterhead, or other print job.