Recently Gelato announced a new tier of paid membership for print on demand sellers called Gelato Gold. It costs a whopping $600 per year and includes 3 months of free shipping on all your orders. Several other print on demand platforms like Printify also have paid memberships that offer some benefits, so this gave me the idea to compare the benefits of different paid memberships from these platforms and offer my opinion on their value. Stick around and let’s figure out whether any of these programs are worth it.
One thing I want to preface this conversation with is that I don’t recommend that you jump right into a paid membership if you just opened your print on demand store and don’t have any sales yet. All the platforms I’m going to discuss have a free account that is the best option when you are just getting started. In fact I did an episode of the podcast and a video on the YouTube channel all about some great free tools & resources for new sellers. I’ll include that video in the blog post for this episode on podinsights.net if you want to check it out.
Additionally, I wouldn’t recommend paying for multiple memberships across several platforms unless your order volume for each one supports the cost. I personally have a Printify Premium membership because I use Printify as my primary platform for about 80% of my products. I use Printful, Gelato, and Gooten for some additional products but only have a free account on those platforms because my order volume for them isn’t enough to justify paying for an additional higher-tier membership when you look at the benefits they offer and we’ll go through all the benefits for each one in just a moment. Basically I just wanted to put that disclaimer out there that you always need to consider these things from the business perspective – is paying for this thing, whatever it is, going to give me a return on my investment that is more than what I’m putting in? Now I’m not saying it’s never worth paying for a premium membership on multiple platforms. For example if you use Printify for your t-shirt fulfillment and you do 100+ orders per month that include t-shirts and you use Gelato for posters with another 100+ orders per month for posters, then it may make sense to have both a Printify Premium and a Gelato+ membership. But you would have to do the math to make sure that both are worth it (spoiler: Printify Premium is worth it even if you have much less in monthly sales – more on that later).
Ok, let’s dig into what each platform offers for paid memberships and the benefits that are included.
Gelato
We’re going to start with Gelato because they recently announced a new tier for their paid memberships and it gave me the idea for this episode. Gelato’s free account offers access to over 100 global print providers in 34 countries and up to 2 connected stores with 2 users. Gelato now offers two tiers of paid memberships, Gelato+ and Gelato Gold. Interestingly, neither tier will decrease your product pricing directly. Gelato does have a volume discount program based on your monthly sales volume, however that’s available on the free account as well as both paid account tiers. You can also pre-pay by funding your Gelato wallet in advance and get access to lower pricing immediately. For example, the lowest level of the volume discount program is a 5% discount for 5,000EUR in total sales. If you know that you’ll be making at least 5,000EUR in sales within 30 days, you could pre-pay by adding 5,000EUR to your Gelato wallet and that would give you access to the 5% discount on your orders immediately. Of course you should only do this if you are reasonably certain you’ll hit that sales volume within the month. If you don’t pre-pay, then the volume discount program works like Printful’s, where your sales volume from the current month will be used to determine your discount in the following month. I just wanted to point out that you don’t have to pay for a Gelato membership to get access to their discount program, and also that you won’t get any better pricing just for paying for one of the membership tiers.
The first tier, Gelato+, costs $95.88 per year which breaks down to $7.99 per month and there is a 30-day free trial period available. This is pretty affordable compared to most other paid print on demand memberships. Gelato+ includes an expanded access for up to 10 stores and 5 users, as well as some additional features. Premium mockups for apparel and wall art are included, which can help decrease the need to use external mockups from a service like Placeit. So if you don’t pay for an external source of more professional mockups, this could be a good way to improve your mockups for apparel and wall art without going outside the platform. That also saves you some time during the listing creation process. Also included is access to Getty Images and Shutterstock images which might be useful but honestly I’ve never used either of those sources in my designs. Another nice feature is 240 additional fonts for adding custom text into your designs, which is a good feature to have if you plan on selling any personalized items. It can save you time because when you sell personalized, having the text as a laying in your listing means you don’t have to edit the master print file in order to make the adjustment for individual orders. Speaking of personalization, Gelato+ also gives you access to a personalization feature that is pretty cool. If you sell through a Shopify store, the personalization feature allows you to give customers the ability to enter custom text or upload their own images to personalize an item right in the user interface of your store, which is really cool. If you sell on Etsy like I do, unfortunately that functionality is not available because Etsy controls the UI when it comes to the checkout process. However you can still take advantage of the personalization feature on Etsy by adding at least one custom text layer or collection (what Gelato calls a set of images that you define) within your listing design. Gelato provides a video tutorial on how to use this feature for platforms other than Shopify that gives a good explanation on how to do this. When your customer places an order for one of these items through Etsy, the order will sync to your Gelato account and trigger an email that is sent to your customer using the email that is on their order record. The email provides the customer a link to personalize the item. Once they complete this, the order is updated and is submitted to production automatically. This means they do not need to use the personalization field that Etsy provides and it also means you don’t have to edit the print file manually. I think you would still have to submit the order to production if you have your store set to manual fulfillment, but otherwise it totally automates the personalization process which is pretty awesome. The only catch is that it will be an external email sent to your customer, so they need to be looking out for it and you’ll need to set the expectation with them in your listing, because the order won’t go to production until they complete the personalization. You can also choose to sell personalized items the same way as you would for Printify, where you utilize the Etsy personalization field to collect the custom text from the customer and then manually edit the order once it syncs to your Gelato account. This goes back to having a manual step for you, but it might be a little simpler for the customer since they won’t have to use the external personalization feature. If you sell a good volume of items each month through Gelato, I think the Gelato+ plan might be a worthwhile investment for the access to improved mockups, additional fonts, and the personalization feature since the price is relatively reasonable. But if you do sell a consistent monthly volume through Gelato, then maybe Gold is the right choice for you.
Gelato Gold is the new tier option, which costs a sort of shocking $600 per year or $49 per month and there does not seem to be a free trial period. You might assume that a price tag that high would come with discounted pricing on products, but it does not. It does include one financial benefit that could justify the annual price and that is 3 months of free shipping on your orders. So if you sell a good volume within 3 months of subscribing, that can be a significant amount. For example, right now the base shipping rate for white 11oz mugs is $4.60 in the US. If you sold 50 mugs per month for 3 months, the shipping cost would be $690. So you would have paid $600 for Gelato Gold and saved $690 on shipping, netting you a profitable return of $90 without considering any of the other benefits. But there’s one big caveat: that free shipping benefit is only in the first year of your subscription, it doesn’t repeat each year. So if you intend to keep using Gelato as your primary platform long-term, you’ll have to re-assess whether the Gold subscription is still worth $600 in the second year based on the remaining benefits. Speaking of other benefits, there’s one more shipping-related benefit included, and that is access to live shipping rates and shipping profit margin. Your shipping profiles can be updated to show customers the live shipping rates based on the shipping method and location for more accurate and fair shipping prices, and also save you time when it comes to updating your shipping profiles. They also include the option to add a profit percentage into your shipping prices which works with Shopify and Etsy, so you can increase shipping prices for flat-rate and live shipping rates if that is part of your pricing plan. For example, if you want to lower your list price for mugs by 10% to look more competitive, you can set up your shipping rates in Gelato to include additional profit margin so your total profit comes out the same, and this will update your Etsy shipping profiles accordingly, saving you time. They also include some automation features with Gelato Gold, including a product expansion option for wall art, which lets you add new types of wall art products using an existing listing and design with just a few clicks rather than creating new listings from scratch. There is also an order automation feature that can streamline the process of uploading custom order designs and the order approval process, which means you don’t have to set your order approval process to manual. This saves you the time of having to manually approve every order, even the ones that don’t have personalization. This is a great feature, but keep in mind that Printful offers the ability to do this with their free account. Printify does not currently offer a workflow like this for any tier of account. Gelato Gold also includes all the features that are included in Gelato+, with access for up to 25 stores and 20 users. One last benefit worth mentioning is that the Gold subscription also provides dedicated support to assist you in migrating your existing product listings over to the platform, so if you have a large catalog of listings that you’d like to switch fulfillment over, you will have some dedicated representatives to help you with that which is always nice.
So is it worth the big price tag? In my opinion, if you are going to be using Gelato as your primary print on demand platform and you can be relatively certain that your shipping costs over 3 months will be at least $600, then I do think it’s worth having the additional features because at that point, you’re basically getting the extra features for free in the first year. If your shipping costs over 3 months are substantially more than $600, then this is a great option because anything over $600 in shipping charges during that period is profit being added to your bottom line. Of course, you’ll need to reevaluate this starting in year 2 since the free shipping offer doesn’t repeat. It’s kind of like getting a new credit card because the bonus offer will pay you back more than the annual fee, but then in year 2 you have to decide if you still want to keep it without that bonus to cover the fee. If you are using Gelato as a secondary platform to fulfill a few specific items or your international orders like I do, then the Gold tier is likely not going to be worth it unless you are selling a high volume of those specific items each month. I would say if you are selling a high volume through Gelato monthly, then the Gold plan is a good value in year one and something to evaluate in year 2. The other features may be hard to quantify in terms of value, so it could make it tough to decide whether to stick with Gold or drop down to the Gelato+ subscription in year 2 in order to keep the personalization features but lose some of the other automation.
Printify
Next up is the Printify Premium subscription. I actually made a video about this on the YouTube channel recently so you can check that out if you’re interested. If you use Printify as your primary print on demand platform like I do and have at least 30 monthly sales, I believe a premium account is a no-brainer. The cost for the premium account is $29 per month if paid monthly or $299 per year if paid annually which decreases the monthly cost to $24.99. The threshold where the account pays for itself is very low because Printify includes discounted product pricing with the premium account so you immediately get access to lower prices and higher profit margins on every order. The discount is up to 20% and varies by product. If we use an example of a common t-shirt, say the Bella+Canvas 3001 from print provider Monster Digital, the free account price is $9.82 for most sizes, and that decreases to $8.57 with the premium account. The price difference of $1.25 may not seem like much, but if you sell 30 shirts in a month you’ve already accumulated a savings of $37.50, which more than covers the monthly cost of $29. Once your business scales up and you’re selling a higher volume per month, it can be a significant boost to your profits. If you sell 100 shirts per month, your profits will be $125 higher than without the premium account. This is why I say it’s a no-brainer as long as you’re making at least 30 sales per month. The difference in pricing varies by product as I mentioned, but even if you only sell one product type through Printify it most likely is going to be profitable for you to have the premium account. The premium account also gives you access to connect up to 10 stores instead of the 5 that are included in the free account.
If you’d like to try the premium account, Printify has provided a coupon code for POD Insights listeners that is valid through December 31, 2022 and it will give you 30 days of free premium. Just enter the coupon code “podinsights” as one word, all lower-case on the payments page of your Printify account. After 30 days you will need to pay the monthly fee in order to keep the premium account but you can also cancel it before the coupon expires if you like. You’ll also still be able to get the one-time account credit of $29 after paying the first month’s fee, so that’s basically another free month that they are providing. It’s a great value if you want to check it out! If you don’t remember the coupon code later just check out my website podinsights.net, I’ve got the coupon right on the main page of the site. Printify does sponsor some of my videos on the YouTube channel but I don’t get anything if you sign up for a premium account, it’s just something they are providing my listeners and I really do think it’s worth it. I’ve had a premium account for over a year and I will be keeping it for as long as I’m using Printify as my primary platform.
Printful
Printful also offers 2 paid account tiers in addition to their free option, Printful Plus and Printful Pro. The free Printful account offers features that I think most sellers need, including a workflow for personalized items without having to manually submit all your orders to production. Printful’s catalog of products is pretty big but not quite as large as Printify. One small but nice feature, especially for Etsy sellers, is that you can add custom messages to packing slips which allows you to add gift messages, something that not many print on demand platforms offer. As I mentioned earlier, Printful offers a monthly volume discount program for all account types, so even the free account has access to reduced pricing based on your monthly sales volume. However you can’t pre-pay in order to get access to the lower pricing like you can with Gelato, so your discounts are based on the prior month’s sales volume. So keep in mind that neither of the two paid tiers with Printful will lower your product prices.
The Printful Plus plan costs $9 per month or $108 per year and there is a 14-day free trial. The benefits included are the ability to create custom mockups, a background remover feature for your designs, and access to create marketing promos using your product mockups. These are the only benefits that Printful lists for the Plus account in addition to what is available with the free account. The ability to create better mockups is nice, but if you already have a free or paid Placeit account, this doesn’t have much value in my opinion. The other benefits are things I currently get from my editing software or from Canva, so again those don’t add much in terms of benefit for me. To be frank, this account is not worth $100 per year in my opinion. I think it would be more worth it to use a free Canva account and free Placeit account to get the same benefits for $0 or even pay $80 per year for a paid Placeit account for access to more mockups and other features and keep the free Printful account.
The Printful Pro account increases the cost significantly, to $49 per month or $549 per year if paid annually. There is also a 14-day free trial period available. As you might expect, there are more benefits included with the Pro account compared to the Plus account. However only one of them is really a financial benefit that contributes to a higher profit, and that is free embroidery file digitization. Printful normally charge $6.50 to digitize each print file for embroidery, on the first order for each new design. This means you’re probably going to have a near-zero profit for the first item you sell with each embroidery design, unless you ordered a sample and incurred the fee at that time. Since this is not a time-limited benefit, you have the whole year to sell new embroidered designs with no fees. If you created 100 new embroidery designs throughout the year and each one sold at least one time, that would be $650 in fees that you avoided, making the $549 annual fee worthwhile and giving you a $100 return on the investment. If this is possible for your store, then the Pro plan might be worth it. If you don’t do much with embroidered products, then you likely will not reach that level of value on the waived digitization fee, making it more questionable as to whether the Pro plan is worth it. There are some additional benefits included, like access to their Keyword Scout tool, a keyword research tool made for the Etsy platform. This is a good value but if you already have a preferred research tool like Sale Samurai or eRank, then you don’t need this additional tool. If you don’t have a research tool already, I’d consider the value of the tool around $70-90 per year. Sale Samurai is my preferred research tool, and with my podinsights coupon code (again, one word and all lower-case) you can get an annual subscription for $79. It offers more features and a great chrome extension compared to the Printful Keyword Scout. For this reason, I don’t personally consider access to Keyword Scout as a real benefit of the Pro plan since I already have a tool that I prefer to use and it offers more features. However if you don’t want to pay for a separate research tool, I’d say you can consider the value of Keyword Scout around $70-90, so you would need to be able to get around $460 in value out of the free embroidery digitization to justify the cost of the subscription. They also include access to over 400 exclusive clipart images that you can incorporate into your designs, however if you already have a graphics service that you use for designs like Vexels or Creative Fabrica, then again this won’t carry much value for you. At the end of the day, I think the Printful Pro plan is only worth it if you can get a high value out of the free embroidery digitization. The other features are nice, but don’t have a direct impact on your bottom line unless they’re saving expense that you would otherwise be paying elsewhere, and for me, they don’t.
Awkward Styles
I’m going to throw one additional print on demand platform into the mix that offers a paid subscription and it’s a relatively new one. Awkward Styles is a print on demand company based in California that has been a provider through Printify for a while, at least for the last two years that I’ve had my account. Within the last year, they created their own online platform for seller-direct accounts so you don’t need to use Printify in order to access their print on demand fulfillment. They also offer more products through their direct platform compared to the selection they currently have on Printify. Their fulfillment locations are in the United States so they may not be the best option out there for a high volume of international orders. They do ship worldwide but customs delays can be frustrating for customers so I like to have my orders fulfilled in the customer’s country whenever possible. But if most of your orders are for US customers, Awkward Styles is an interesting option. They own the fulfillment centers so they are a bit more like Printful in terms of how the company is organized.
They offer a free account as well as a Pro subscription, which costs $25 per month or $20 per month if paid annually, so that would be $240. The Pro subscription includes a one-time credit of $40 for your order expenses, bringing the annual cost down to $200 or $16.67 per month in the first year. It also includes access to up to 20% lower pricing, the same immediate discount that Printify provides in their premium account. They integrate with Etsy and Shopify so you can use their platform the same as you would the other large platforms, where you push listings to your shop and orders sync automatically. You can connect up to 12 stores with the Pro account, rather than the 5 included in the free account. There are no other features included in the Pro account, but honestly I prefer to get financial benefits that go straight to my bottom line when I pay for a membership anyway. Other types of paid memberships like Printful’s Plus plan only provide features that give you a return on investment if you actually use them, where a discount on pricing helps you without any extra effort.
Their base price for a Bella+Canvas 3001 t-shirt is $9.90, and the Pro plan drops that price to $8.90. With a $1.00 difference, you would need to sell 20 t-shirts per month to break even on the cost of the Pro plan. If you sell more than that (or more volume than that for any combination of items), you’ll have higher profits than if you had the free plan. So this option falls into a similar category as the Printify Premium plan, if you can use Awkward Styles to fulfill most of your orders – and if their pricing with the Pro plan is more competitive than what you can get elsewhere. I’ll say that $8.90 for a Bella+Canvas t-shirt is definitely competitive, but you can still get them a tad cheaper on Printify from a couple providers such as Monster Digital at $8.57 or Drive Fulfillment at $8.32 with the Premium account. It may sound like a small difference but it adds up over hundreds or thousands of orders throughout the year. I made over 3,900 sales in my shop in 2021, so a price difference of just 30 cents means a cost difference of over $1,100 for the year. That’s $1,100 that could either be in my pocket, or go towards order fulfillment. But you have to factor in all the products that you will have fulfilled through the platform so if they offer a much lower pricing on something else you are selling at a high volume, it might be worth consolidating your fulfillment and paying a few cents more for some items. My only point is that as a business owner, you can’t ignore small price differences if you want to maximize your profits.
I’ve had good experience with Awkward Styles on the products I’ve had them fulfill through Printify in the past in terms of quality and production times, so if you are looking for a consistent provider for your print on demand shop as well as competitive pricing, Awkward Styles is worth a look.
Conclusion
Are paid print on demand subscriptions worth it? In some cases, yes they’re absolutely worth it and can significantly increase your profits. In other cases, they may not be worth it if you can’t take advantage of all the benefits they offer or don’t have a consistent sales volume yet. The key is going to be for you to assess the benefits against your shop’s current sales performance, and calculate whether you are getting more back than what you are investing in the paid subscription. I think Gelato’s new Gold tier is very interesting if you are using them as your primary platform and Printify’s Premium plan is a no-brainer if you use them to fulfill the majority of your orders. Others require a little bit more analysis to determine if they are right for you.
I hope this has helped you determine what might be right for your print on demand business. Maybe this has only helped you realize that sticking with the free accounts is the best thing for you right now, and that’s totally fine. The best advice I can give would be to only incur an expense for your business if it’s going to create a greater return for you, either by allowing you to create more and better products, improve your listings, or directly increase your profit margins. You shouldn’t invest in something simply because it looks interesting if it won’t help you make more sales or increase profits. Benefits included in these subscriptions are not always an obvious or direct correlation to higher sales or profits – for example, if the order automation features with Gelato Gold free up your time to create more new listings that generate more sales, then that feature has an indirect financial value. But sometimes sticking with free accounts and resources is the right decision, and as I mentioned in the episode about free tools & resources, there’s no need to pay for something if there’s a free version that’s just as good. So keep that in mind when you consider any paid membership or subscription for your business, but also don’t be afraid to make the investment if you’re confident it will help you earn a greater return.
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Thanks for reading.