The maker's costing glossary
Keystone Pricing
The classic 'double the cost' rule of thumb.
Keystone pricing sets the retail price at twice the cost — a 100% markup, which is a 50% margin. It's a fast, traditional heuristic, especially for the wholesale-to-retail step, and a sane starting point when your cost is genuinely known. It is a starting point, not a strategy: it ignores your specific overhead, your market, and the value of your time.
Why it matters
Keystone is useful as a sanity check and a floor, but leaning on it blindly can leave money on the table for distinctive work — or fail to cover overhead for labor-heavy work. Knowing it's a rule of thumb, not a law, is what lets you price above it when the market supports it.
How to calculate it
Multiply the cost by two. To keystone from wholesale to retail, double the wholesale price.
Retail = cost × 2
Example
A $22 cost keystones to a $44 retail price. Fine as a baseline — but a one-of-a-kind piece with hours of labor may well support more, and a commodity item may not reach it.
In practice
Retailers keystone wholesale prices almost automatically, which is why your wholesale price has to leave room for it. Many makers use keystone as their minimum and price signature work higher.
Common mistakes
- Treating keystone as the correct price rather than a starting point.
- Applying it to a cost that left out labor or overhead.
- Never testing whether the market supports a higher price for distinctive work.
How CrafterBy handles it
Keystone is one click in CrafterBy — set a 100% markup — but the tool also lets you price by any target margin when double-the-cost isn't the right answer.