Ask what a company store costs and you will get answers from "free" to five figures a year — which means nobody is answering the actual question. The real cost of a merch program lives in four places: what you pay per product, what you pay to decorate it, what you pay to store or ship it, and what you pay (in money or your own hours) to run the operation. Every pricing model is just a different way of distributing those four numbers.
We publish our own numbers on the pricing page — wholesale product cost plus a flat monthly management fee — so this article is the context behind that choice: where the money hides in the models you will be comparing.
There is no such thing as a free company store. There are only stores where you can see what you are paying, and stores where you cannot.
The "free store" math
Most platforms advertise no setup fees and free storefronts. The economics still work because they build a 40–60% markup into every product sold through the store. A polo listed at $25 in the store catalog often costs $10–12 at distributor pricing. Nobody sends you an invoice for the store — you pay for it on every single order, forever, and so does every employee spending their own money or their allowance in it.
That model is not evil; it is just a loan you repay at volume. The math flips against you as soon as the store gets real usage — which is exactly when you are least likely to re-examine it.
The four real cost drivers
Product cost: blank apparel drops 30–45% per unit between quantities of 24 and 144, so whoever controls order batching controls a third of your program cost. Decoration: screen and digitizing setups run $40–75 per design, amortized across units — five logos on five products at small quantities quietly multiplies this. Storage and shipping: warehoused bulk inventory costs $0.15–0.50 per unit per month, dramatically cheaper than reordering small batches at retail, but only if someone is actually managing stock levels.
And operation: the invisible line item. A mid-size program spread across multiple vendors eats 12–18 admin hours a month in coordination — ordering, tracking, reconciling, chasing shipments. Priced at anyone’s loaded hourly rate, this is frequently the biggest number of the four, and it never appears on any invoice.
What the transparent version looks like
The alternative model is simple: you pay what the product actually costs at wholesale, and a flat monthly management fee covers the operation — curation, mockups, the storefront, order handling, fulfillment coordination, and the inevitable exceptions. The fee is visible, budgetable, and does not scale with every shirt sold. When the store grows, your per-product economics get better instead of worse, because volume pricing passes through to you instead of widening a hidden margin.
If you are budgeting a program, price both models at your expected volume — the crossover comes faster than most people guess. And if you are earlier than that, start with how to build a company store: the five decisions there determine which costs you will even have. When you want real numbers for your actual headcount and product mix, our pricing is public and we will map your version of the math with you.
