Quoting & Cost

Cost Per Label: Building a Defensible Converting Quote

A money-first breakdown of what drives converting cost per unit and how to quote short runs, long runs, and reruns without leaving margin on the table.

Cost per label is dominated by two buckets that move in opposite directions with run length: fixed setup and variable material. On a pressure-sensitive label, substrate and adhesive liner typically run 55 to 70 percent of variable cost, ink and coatings 8 to 15 percent, and direct labor plus machine burden the rest. The Label Cost Per Unit calculator splits these so you can see that a 2,000 label order might cost 9 cents each while the identical 200,000 label order costs 1.1 cents. The difference is almost entirely amortized makeready, not better material pricing.

Material cost starts at square footage bought, not square footage shipped. Facestock and liner are priced per thousand square inches (MSI) or per square meter, commonly 3 to 12 cents per MSI for filmic and paper stocks. You pay for the full web width including edge trim and matrix waste, so a job using 12.75 of 13 inches still buys all 13. Fold your yield loss straight into material: if net good yield is 91.5 percent, divide raw material cost by 0.915 to get true material cost per shipped label. Estimators who price on ordered quantity instead of web consumed routinely undercost by 8 to 12 percent.

Makeready is the single biggest short-run cost driver and the easiest to under-recover. Use the Flexo Makeready Loss and Print Run Cost tools to load both the wasted substrate and the press time. A 20 minute setup on a press with a 210 dollar per hour burden is 70 dollars of machine time plus, say, 8,000 feet of scrapped stock at 4 dollars per thousand square inches. On a 3,000 label run that setup can exceed 40 percent of the quote. Quote makeready as a fixed line item, never blended into unit price, or your short runs subsidize nobody and lose money quietly.

Machine time is burden per hour divided by effective throughput, and throughput is where quotes drift. Press Speed and Roll-To-Roll Throughput give effective feet per hour after roll changes and utilization, typically 60 to 80 percent of nameplate. If you quote at nameplate 500 fpm but run at 380, your per-label machine cost is 32 percent higher than booked. At 210 dollars per hour and 20,600 effective feet per hour, machine cost is about 0.17 dollars per hundred feet. Always cost against demonstrated line speed for that product family, pulled from your own run logs, not the equipment brochure.

Ink and coating cost is small per label but easy to misjudge on high-coverage or spot-color work. The Ink Usage and Digital Print Cost calculators convert coverage to grams and dollars. UV flexo ink at 15 to 30 dollars per kilogram at 0.003 to 0.01 grams per label is well under a tenth of a cent, but a heavy varnish, cold foil, or a fifth and sixth station changes both consumables and makeready. Digital toner or inkjet flips the model entirely: click or coverage charges of 1 to 4 cents per label make ink the dominant variable cost, which is why digital wins short runs and loses long ones.

Scrap belongs in the quote as a yield divisor, not a vague percentage tacked on at the end. Combine Web Waste and Die Cut Yield into an overall yield: 7 percent web waste and 1.5 percent die loss give roughly 91.6 percent net yield. Every variable cost, material, ink, and the good-footage share of press time, gets divided by 0.916. Adding a flat 5 percent contingency instead systematically undercosts jobs with heavy makeready and overcosts clean long runs. Tie scrap to the specific press, substrate, and job complexity from historical Substrate Yield data.

Overhead and margin sit on top of fully burdened cost, and the mistake is applying one blanket markup. Plant overhead not already in the machine rate, prepress, plates or digital file setup, quality inspection, and rewind or finishing each carry their own recovery. Plate cost of 40 to 120 dollars per color amortizes over the run: six plates at 80 dollars is 480 dollars, trivial at 200,000 labels but 24 cents each on a 2,000 label proof run. Break these out so a reorder that reuses plates drops legitimately in price and your customer trusts the number.

Where estimates go wrong most often: quoting ordered quantity instead of web consumed, blending makeready into unit price so short runs hide their true cost, using nameplate speed, forgetting that reorders skip prepress and makeready, and treating scrap as a flat add rather than a yield divisor. A defensible quote shows four visible lines, one-time setup, material at true yield, run cost at demonstrated speed, and finishing, then applies overhead and margin. Rebuild the same job in Print Run Cost at 2,000 and at 100,000 units and confirm the per-unit curve bends the way physics says it should.

Published 2026-07-01.