CraftForge — Handmade, Printables & Maker Business Command Center

Make it. Price it. Get paid for it.

CraftForge is a complete, private, 100% offline operating system for a maker business — handmade goods, made-to-order commissions, cut files and printables. 15 integrated modules and 39 tools in a single HTML file, plus a live 11-sheet Excel workbook. Nothing installs. No account. No cost, price or takings figure ever leaves your computer.

What an hour at your bench actually pays

Materials times two and a half is how almost every maker is taught to price, and it hides the only number that matters.

The worked example inside sells an engraved ornament at $6.50. Materials are $1.17, so on that rule it looks like a healthy product. Take off the $1.07 marketplace fee, the $0.39 of packaging, the $1.35 of postage absorbed on free shipping and the sixteen minutes of making, finishing and packing, and it pays $9.18 an hour — below the floor that maker set for themselves. It is also their best seller at 885 a year, and 27% of every hour that reaches the bench.

The ceiling you hit before you run out of customers

A handmade thing is bound by hands. The sample workshop works 26 hours a week for 48 weeks, of which 78% reaches a bench — the rest is photography, listings, messages, ordering and the post office, none of it optional. That is 979 bench hours a year and 854 are already used.

At the mix being sold, every remaining hour is worth about $32. So filling every last one would add $3,994. That is the whole of the growth available from selling more of the same thing, and no amount of marketing moves it. December alone already needs 135 bench hours where a month holds 88 — which is what the stock in the workshop actually is.

Twenty-one screens

The catalogue — Product Register, where minutes mean making, finishing, packing, the failure rate and the photography time spread across everything a product will ever sell · True Hourly Rate (the flagship) · Capacity Ceiling · Digital vs Handmade, putting a cut file and a bench on one honest axis: every hour ever put in, against everything it has returned.

Making it — Materials and Suppliers, where a ten per cent rise is costed across every recipe it appears in · Time Study · Batching, with the run size a setup starts paying for itself from · Waste and Seconds, by reason, in materials and in hours.

Selling it — Fees and Marketplaces, showing the same product sold three ways · Shipping, where free postage is priced as the discount it is · Pricing, laying every formula you were taught beside the answer · Listings and Photos · Markets and Fairs, costing the whole day against what the same hours would have returned at the bench.

The business — Custom Orders, separating the estimating problem from the scope problem · Stock On Hand, with cover measured against the months it is actually for rather than an average month · Seasonality, and the wall in the middle of it.

Eight calculators

True hourly rate · Price it properly, working the marketplace cut back out of the price rather than adding it on top · Batch saving · Free postage, and the sales drop charging it could survive · Capacity ceiling · Digital file payback · Craft fair · Custom order.

Twelve copy-ready pieces

The title formula · the description that answers the five questions every buyer asks · the FAQ block · the custom-enquiry reply with its revision limit · the “yes, but” reply · the dispatch note · the card for the box · the review ask · the restock notice · the wholesale line sheet · the craft fair application · the price rise notice.

What you get

• CraftForge-Handmade-Maker-Command-Center.html — the whole application, one file, offline
• CraftForge-Companion-Workbook.xlsx — 11 live formula-driven sheets
• Quick-Start-Guide.html — eight steps to your first real number
• How-To-Use-Guide.html — the full manual, screen by screen
• README.txt and LICENSE.txt

Genuinely private. It makes no network requests of any kind. Your supplier prices, costs, minutes and takings stay in your own browser and are never transmitted anywhere.

Honest by design. Materials are never typed against a product — they come off a recipe, so one supplier price rise moves every product that material appears in. A digital file is given no hourly rate, in the app and in the workbook alike, because it has no minutes per unit. And where a number could only be guessed at — what a price rise does to your volume, what fixing a photograph is worth — the item is listed with nothing against it rather than a figure somebody invented.

CraftForge performs arithmetic on figures you supply. It is not legal, tax, insurance, trading-standards or product-safety advice. Marketplace fees and postage rates change without notice and are whatever you type in.