How we compare print on demand services
We list 9 print on demand services selling into the UK, and a published rate card exists for 9 providers. Where a service will only quote, we show a quote rather than a figure we invented on its behalf.
The calculator is driven by monthly order volume and the price you sell at, because there is no monthly licence here to compare. Cost arrives per order, so ranking is arithmetic on each service's published base cost plus its UK delivery charge at the volume you enter, with the membership toggle applying a service's own published discount where it has one. Commission never moves a service, we do not sell prominence, and the cheapest row is whatever the arithmetic says it is.
Prices are what each service publishes to a UK buyer, in pounds. Read the VAT wording inside each base cost before you compare the column, because the cells do not all state it the same way, which is the first thing the next section deals with.
Every print on demand sale is priced per order, not per month
Almost every other category on this site sells you a subscription. This one sells you a unit cost, and your margin is whatever is left after the service takes its base cost and its delivery charge out of the price your customer paid.
That makes two rows the whole comparison. Base cost runs from Yoycol at £4 and Merchize at £4 through Prodigi at £6.82 and Printify at £6.95, up to Contrado at £26.45 incl VAT for handmade, made to order work.
Delivery is a separate lever and it does not track base cost at all. Gelato charges £2.80 to deliver in the UK, Printful £3.59, Printify £4.50, Gooten £7 and Teemill Included. A cheap garment behind an expensive courier can land dearer than a better garment behind a cheap one, which is why the calculator adds the two before it sorts anything, and why reading the base cost column alone will mislead you.
Check the VAT basis before you compare a single figure. Printful states its base as £8.10 incl VAT and Contrado states its base as £26.45 incl VAT, both carrying the VAT basis inside the figure itself. Other cells in that column state a base without one. If you are VAT registered, the VAT you are charged on a supplier invoice is input tax you reclaim, so the ex VAT figure is the one that decides your margin. If you are trading below the registration threshold, it is simply money gone, and a VAT inclusive base cost is genuinely dearer to you than the same number quoted without it.
One further UK wrinkle that catches sellers of kids' ranges: young children's clothing is zero rated for VAT where it meets HMRC's size criteria, so the VAT you charge on a children's tee is not the VAT you charge on the adult version of the same design. That changes what you collect, not what the printer charges you, and it is worth settling before you set one flat retail price across a range.
Teemill sits slightly outside this shape. Its base cost cell reads £15.30 (implied) because it runs a minimum sell price model with its own store builder rather than publishing a conventional wholesale base, so treat that figure as derived from how the model works rather than as a quoted trade price.
The break-even on a paid print on demand membership
Some services sell a monthly plan that buys a percentage off base cost. The mechanism is always the same and it is worth doing on paper rather than by feel.
Work out the saving on one order first, which is the discount percentage applied to that service's base cost and generally not to delivery. Divide the monthly fee by that per order saving. The answer is the number of orders a month at which the membership starts to be free, and every order above it is profit you would not otherwise have had. Then do the honest part: compare that number to your quietest month of the last year, not your best one. A membership priced against your Christmas volume loses money for the rest of the year.
The plans differ in ways the headline fee hides. Gelato lists £15/mo (Gelato+, annual) for ~20% on a tee, so the commitment is a year even though the figure is monthly. Printify lists £29/mo (Premium, monthly) for ~21% on a tee, which you can stop the month it stops earning. Printful lists £19.99/mo (Growth, free above £9K/yr) for ~10% on a tee, so the fee itself is conditional on turnover rather than fixed.
Most of the table charges nothing for access. Prodigi, Gooten, Contrado, Teemill, Yoycol and Merchize all list membership as Free, with the discount row reading None. That is not a worse deal, it is a different one: their base cost is the price, with nothing to amortise.
If you are shipping a handful of orders a month, you probably do not need any paid plan yet. Buy one when the arithmetic above says so, and not because the tier is sitting there in the dashboard.
The other cost nobody budgets for is samples, and you will order more of them than you expect, because approving a print from a screen mockup is how you end up refunding a colour. Printful lists samples at 20% to 25% off, Prodigi at At cost, Merchize at Samples at base cost, Gooten at Sample credit (VIM) and Teemill at Order at retail.
Where your print on demand order is printed, and what a European sale costs after Brexit
This row does more work than any other in the table, because it sets delivery time, it sets your customs position, and it is the one thing you cannot change later without changing supplier.
Printed in the UK. Printful prints at Wolverhampton (own DTG and embroidery facility), Teemill at Isle of Wight factory, Contrado at London (handmade, made to order) and Prodigi at UK production lab. Printify routes UK orders through UK print partners (Prodigi, Print Clever, Harrier), and Gelato through UK sites within a 140+ facility network.
Printed elsewhere. Yoycol prints in China and Merchize in Vietnam (primary); claimed UK, EU, US, AU, China nodes, which is why Merchize's UK row reads Partial (claimed UK and EU node) rather than a straight yes. When a garment is made outside the UK and shipped to a UK customer, that order is an import, and import VAT and possibly duty attach to it somewhere in the chain.
Delivery time follows directly. Prodigi quotes 2 to 3 days in the UK and Teemill 2 to 4 days, while Yoycol quotes 7 to 14 days and Merchize 7 to 20 days. Express exists on most of the table, but not uniformly: Printify's express row reads No (Express is US-only), Gooten's reads Where the partner supports it and Teemill's reads Case by case, so a next day promise on your product page needs checking against the supplier before you make it.
Then the part that has changed since Brexit. A sale from a UK printer to a customer in the EU is an export. It needs a customs declaration, and unless you have arranged otherwise the recipient can be asked for import VAT and a handling fee by the courier before they are given the parcel. A shopper who paid you at checkout and is then billed again on the doorstep does not blame the courier, they blame you, and that is a refund and a review. The EU's Import One Stop Shop exists so that you can charge the destination VAT at checkout on low value consignments instead, which turns an unpleasant surprise into a line on the receipt.
The clean way around it is to have the order printed inside the EU in the first place, which makes it a domestic EU delivery rather than an import. That is what a distributed network buys you. Gelato's global row reads Yes (local production, 32+ countries), Gooten's fulfilment reads UK and EU production partners and Prodigi's global row reads Yes (50+ labs, 10+ countries). A single site UK maker cannot do that by definition, so if European customers are a real share of your sales, weigh that against the shorter UK delivery a domestic factory gives you.
Faults, returns and the custom goods exemption in print on demand
Two things are true at once here, and sellers routinely get one of them wrong.
The first is that you are the trader, not the printer. Your customer's contract is with your shop. Whatever the fulfilment service does or does not agree to cover is a matter between you and your supplier, and it does not narrow the rights your buyer has against you.
The second is the exemption that makes this category unusual. Under the Consumer Contracts Regulations a distance selling customer normally has a cooling off period of fourteen days to change their mind and send goods back for a refund. Goods made to the consumer's specification, or clearly personalised, are excluded from that right. A shirt printed with a name, a date or a customer supplied image will usually sit inside that exclusion. A shirt carrying one of your standard catalogue designs, printed only after they ordered it, very often does not, because it was not made to their specification: it was made to yours. Treat the exclusion as narrower than it sounds, write your returns policy around what you actually sell, and take advice if the line is genuinely unclear for your range.
None of that touches faults. Under the Consumer Rights Act goods must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described, and a customised item is no exception. A misprint, a crooked transfer or the wrong size in the bag is your problem to fix regardless of who printed it.
So read the returns row as a supply agreement rather than as a customer policy. 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), Prodigi lists Free reprint on defects and Merchize lists Reprint or refund on defects (contact support). Teemill's row reads Circular take-back scheme; defects replaced, which is a different proposition again.
Notice what every one of those rows has in common: they cover defects and production errors. They do not cover a customer who ordered the wrong size, changed their mind, or hated the colour in daylight. That cost is yours, it scales with your order volume rather than with your subscription, and it belongs in your margin model from the first month rather than the first bad week.
Product range, branding and the sales channels a print on demand service supports
Once cost and fulfilment are settled, the remaining question is whether the service fits the shop you already run.
Channels. Printful connects to Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, Ecwid, Square, TikTok, Amazon, eBay. Printify connects to Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, eBay, Amazon, TikTok, Walmart and Gelato to Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, eBay, Amazon, TikTok. At the narrower end, Prodigi lists Shopify, Etsy, BigCommerce, CSV and Contrado lists Shopify (native app). Teemill lists Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Wix, Ecwid, plus a built-in store builder, which is the only route here that does not assume you already have a storefront. Check this row for the name of the platform you sell on before you check anything else, because it removes options faster than price does.
Range. Printify's catalogue reads 1,300+, Prodigi's Very large (500k+ SKUs), Yoycol's 800+ (all-over-print) and Teemill's Apparel and organic focused. Breadth matters less than it looks. Most sellers ship a small number of lines repeatedly, so a deep catalogue is only useful if it is deep in the specific thing you sell.
Your name on the parcel. Printful offers Inside labels, pack-in inserts, custom packaging, Contrado offers White-label and private-label dispatch, Printify offers Neck labels, pack-in inserts (partner-dependent) and Gooten offers White-label slip; paid white-label packaging. If a repeat customer is the point of the business, an unbranded polybag is working against you every time.
Automation and design tooling. API access is broadly available: Prodigi lists Yes (Print API) and Contrado lists Yes (REST API), while Yoycol's row reads Not confirmed, which matters if you were planning to script anything. On the design side, Printify's AI row reads Native (AI Image Generator), Prodigi's Native (AI Mockup Generator) and Gelato's mockup row Yes (Magic Mockups AI on Gelato+). Useful for listing photography and for filling a shop quickly, and not a reason to accept a worse unit cost on every order you ever ship.