How we compare print on demand services in the US
We list 9 print on demand services selling into the US, and a published rate card exists for 9 services. Where a company will not publish a figure we show that it quotes, rather than printing a number invented on its behalf.
The calculator runs on your monthly order count, the price you sell a unit for, what a unit costs you today, and whether you would pay for a membership. There is a delivery filter too, because a service that cannot land inside your promised window is not a candidate however cheap the blank is.
Ranking is arithmetic on published base costs and shipping at the order count you enter. A commercial relationship with us never moves a service up or down the table, we do not sell placement, and the cheapest row is whatever the numbers say it is.
The reference product across the table is a standard printed t-shirt, because it is the one item every service here makes. A poster or a mug carries its own base cost and its own shipping weight, so treat the tee as a yardstick rather than as your bill.
Wall art, mugs and homeware: print on demand beyond the t-shirt
The category is still described as if it were a t-shirt business, and the catalogs stopped being that some time ago. If you sell prints, canvases, mugs, cushions or phone cases, range decides your shortlist before price does.
Catalog depth is the first thing to read. Printify lists 1,300+, Printful lists 500+ and Contrado lists 450+. Prodigi lists Very large (500k+ SKUs), which is a different kind of number: it is a print-first catalog, so paper stocks, sizes and framing options multiply out into an enormous SKU count rather than into an enormous range of garment styles.
Then there is the specialty, which matters more than the raw count:
All-over print. Sublimation across a whole cut-and-sewn item, rather than a design squared onto the front of a blank. Yoycol lists 800+ (all-over-print) and Merchize lists 150+ (claims around 1,000). Seasonal gifts and bold homeware live here, and the method is genuinely different from direct-to-garment.
Framed art and wall decor. A print business with a framing operation attached, where quality is a function of paper, ink and glazing rather than of garment brand. Prodigi is built around that end of the market.
Made to order in a single workshop. Contrado lists its fulfillment as London (handmade, made to order), which is a deliberate product rather than a shortcoming: the base cost reflects it and so does the finish.
Broad but partner-routed. Printify lists US print partners (Monster Digital FL, Dream Junction KY/CA, SPOKE GA) and Gooten lists US production partners. A network model buys you range, and it means the print quality on a mug and the print quality on a hoodie may come from two different companies.
Order the exact item you plan to sell, from the exact service, before you list it. Sample terms vary: Printful lists 20% to 25% off, Spreadconnect lists 20% off samples, Merchize lists Samples at base cost and Prodigi lists At cost. A catalog photograph tells you nothing about how a sublimated cushion actually feels.
The per-order math that decides your print on demand margin
There is no seat count here and no monthly platform fee holding the category up. The cost of goods lands on every order, and it has two parts that must be read together.
The base product cost is what the service charges you for the printed item. On a tee that is $9.25 on Printful, $9.24 on Printify, $10.12 on Gelato, $6.99 on Gooten, $9.15 on Prodigi and $5.07 on Yoycol.
Shipping is the half that gets ignored, and on a single-item order it is a large share of the total. US shipping runs $4.75 on Printful, $5.19 on Printify, $4.99 on Gelato, $6.29 on Merchize and $9.95 on Contrado. Read those two rows as one number, because that is how the money leaves your account.
Two things follow from that shape, and both are worth acting on:
A low base cost with heavy shipping can lose to a higher base cost with light shipping. The order in this table changes depending on which of the two you look at, which is exactly why the calculator adds them rather than ranking on either alone.
Your own selling price is the missing variable. A dollar of cost of goods is trivial on a framed print and decisive on a mug, which is why the calculator asks for it. Enter what you actually charge and the order count you actually ship.
One data note. Spreadconnect publishes rates behind a merchant login rather than an open price list, so its base cost of $7.79 (est.) and shipping of $3.57 (est.) carry an estimate marker here. Confirm both in your own account before you build a price list on them.
When a paid print on demand membership earns back its fee
Some services sell a monthly membership that buys a percentage off the base cost of everything you order. It is the one recurring charge in this category, and whether it is worth paying is arithmetic rather than judgment.
Printify charges $39/mo (Premium, monthly) for ~24% on a tee. Gelato charges $19.99/mo (Gelato+, annual) for ~20% on a tee. Printful runs a different shape again at $24.99/mo (Growth, free above $12K/yr) for ~10% on a tee, where the fee falls away once your store passes a revenue level the service publishes. Gooten, Prodigi, Merchize, Spreadconnect, Yoycol and Contrado all list their membership as Free, so on those the question does not arise.
The method, which you should run on your own catalog rather than on a tee:
Work out the saving on one order. Apply the published discount to the base cost of the item you actually sell most of. That is your saving per unit, and it is smaller on a cheap blank than on an expensive one.
Divide the monthly fee by that saving. The answer is the number of orders per month at which the membership washes its face. Below that you are paying for the privilege of a discount you did not use.
Check it against your worst month, not your best. Print on demand demand is seasonal for almost everyone selling gifts or apparel, and a membership billed monthly still bills in February. If the annual commitment is cheaper per month, the same question applies across twelve months rather than one.
Look at what else the membership carries. The discount is not always the whole value. Gelato lists its mockup generator as Yes (Magic Mockups AI on Gelato+) and its branding options as Labels, inserts (Gelato+), both behind the paid tier.
If you are still finding product-market fit, the honest answer is that you probably do not need this yet. The free tiers here are genuinely free to start, and a membership is a bet on volume you have not placed yet.
Where your print on demand orders are printed, and the state tax question behind it
The printing location is the single most consequential fact about a service, and it decides three separate things at once.
Delivery time to a US buyer. Printful lists US printing as Yes (Charlotte, Dallas) and quotes 3 to 7 days. Spreadconnect lists Yes (Henderson NV, Greensburg PA) and quotes 5 to 10 days. Prodigi lists Yes (Charlotte NC plus partner labs) and quotes 5 to 10 days. Offshore is a different proposition: Yoycol lists No (China) and quotes 10 to 20 days, and Contrado lists No (London, UK) and quotes 5 to 10 days. Merchize is a hybrid, listing Partial (Texas facility; AOP ships from Vietnam), which means the answer depends on which product a customer buys.
What you are allowed to promise at checkout. The FTC Mail Order Rule sets the baseline expectation that you ship within the time you advertise, or within thirty days if you advertise nothing, and that you tell the buyer and offer a refund when you cannot. That obligation is yours, not your print partner's, so the delivery window on your product page has to be built from the window your partner actually quotes, not from the one you wish it quoted. Express options exist and cost money: Printful lists Yes (1 to 3 days), Gooten lists Yes (expedited and overnight) and Yoycol lists Yes (DHL, expensive).
Where physical activity happens on your behalf. This is the part almost no print on demand seller thinks about. State sales tax obligations can be triggered by economic activity in a state, and in many states also by physical presence, which can include inventory or fulfillment activity carried out for you there. A network model spreads that activity around: Printify lists US print partners (Monster Digital FL, Dream Junction KY/CA, SPOKE GA), Printful lists Charlotte NC and Dallas TX (own DTG and embroidery facilities) and Spreadconnect lists Henderson NV and Greensburg PA (own facilities). Whether any of that creates an obligation for you turns on each state's rules and on how the arrangement is structured, which no comparison table can answer. What is worth doing is knowing which states your orders are physically produced in, and putting that list in front of a CPA before your volume makes the question expensive.
Selling abroad raises the same question in another jurisdiction. Gelato lists Yes (local production, 32+ countries) with 5 to 12 days, and Prodigi lists Yes (50+ labs, 10+ countries) with 5 to 15 days. Local production abroad avoids a cross-border shipment on every order, which is what generates customs charges and angry emails.
Returns on a print on demand order are your policy, not a federal right
American buyers frequently assume a legal right to send an online order back. There is no general federal cooling-off right for an online purchase in the US. Some state laws and some marketplace rules apply, and a defective item is a different matter entirely, but for a change-of-mind return on a non-defective product your own published policy is what governs.
That matters more here than in most retail, because your goods are made after the sale. Nobody resells a mug with a stranger's dog on it, so a generous change-of-mind policy is a cost you absorb in full.
Which puts the weight on the other kind of return: the misprint, the crooked transfer, the cracked frame. Here the vendor policy is the thing protecting your margin, and it is not uniform. Printful lists Free reprint or refund on Printful errors (30 days), Printify lists Free reprint or refund on defects (30 days), Gelato lists Free replacement on defects (30 days), Gooten lists Free reprint on defects (4 weeks) and Prodigi lists Free reprint on defects (14 days). Contrado lists Defects replaced, Yoycol lists Reprint on defects, Merchize lists Reprint or refund on defects (contact support) and Spreadconnect lists Replacement or refund on defects.
Read those rows for three things. The window, because a claim raised outside it is yours to fund. Whether the remedy is a reprint or a refund, since a reprint keeps the customer and a refund keeps the cash. And what counts as a defect, because print position tolerance and color shift are the arguments that actually happen.
Write your store policy to sit inside your partner terms rather than outside them. One that promises more than your partner will fund is a liability you wrote yourself.
Which storefronts and marketplaces each print on demand service connects to
The integration list is a hard filter, and worth applying before anything else on this page: a service that does not connect to the store you already run means manual order entry forever.
Printful connects to Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, Magento, Ecwid, Square, TikTok, Amazon, eBay. Printify connects to Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, eBay, Amazon, TikTok, Walmart. Gelato connects to Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, eBay, TikTok. Merchize connects to Shopify, WooCommerce, Etsy, Amazon, eBay, TikTok Shop, Walmart, Prodigi to Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, Magento, Squarespace and Gooten to Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, BigCommerce. At the narrower end, Contrado connects to Shopify (native app), Yoycol to Shopify, WooCommerce, Etsy, eBay, Wix and Spreadconnect to Shopify, WooCommerce, plus Etsy, Amazon, eBay via Order Desk.
Two distinctions inside those lists matter more than the length of them.
A storefront connection is not a marketplace connection. Etsy, Amazon, eBay, Walmart and TikTok Shop each impose their own delivery expectations and returns handling, and a service that reaches your Shopify store may reach those through a middleware layer rather than natively. Check the channel you sell on, not the brand name.
An API is what you use when the app is not enough. Gooten lists Yes, Prodigi lists Yes (Print API), Spreadconnect lists Yes (Spreadconnect API) and Yoycol lists Not confirmed. If you route orders from a custom site or an internal system, that row is the one that decides whether the integration is a weekend or a quarter.
Design tooling sits alongside this and moves quickly. Printify lists AI features as Native (AI Image Generator), Prodigi as Native (AI Mockup Generator) and Printful as Limited (Smart Image Tool, no text-to-image). Useful, and not a reason to pick a service: the tooling changes every few months, while base cost, printing location and returns terms are what you live with.