CutForge — Cut File & Digital Craft Shop Command Center

Every listing costs. Not every listing pays.

CutForge is a complete, private, 100% offline operating system for a cut-file shop — SVGs, DXFs, PNGs and layered files sold on Etsy, Creative Fabrica, Design Bundles and your own store. 15 integrated modules and 39 tools in a single HTML file, plus a live 12-sheet Excel workbook. Nothing installs. No account. No design, order or fee figure ever leaves your computer.

The fee percentage everybody quotes does not exist

Every guide to selling digital files gives you one number: the platform takes about X per cent. That number is wrong for almost every order you will ever take.

Marketplace fees come in three shapes: a share of the money, a fixed amount charged once per order, and a fixed amount charged once per file. In the worked example inside — 654 designs, three years of orders across four channels — a one-file order pays 33.7% and an order of six pays 28.3%. Same shop, same prices, same platform. The only difference is how many files were in the basket.

And the fee that never dilutes

Here is the part that catches people out. The listing renewal is charged once per file, so it follows the basket up and never gets cheaper — and in the example it is nearly twice the flat fee. Which means the standard advice to bundle harder to save on fees is reading the wrong column. CutForge shows you the columns separately, because that is the only way the decision makes sense.

The price under which a file cannot make money

A fixed fee on a small order is not a small fee. There is a price below which a one-file order cannot keep the share you asked for however many you sell — and selling more only makes it worse. CutForge works out yours, for every basket size, from your own channel fees.

Did the bundle make money, or just move it?

A bundle earns money and also stops people buying the files inside it singly. Measuring the second half by looking at the bundled designs alone is worthless — their sales would have fallen anyway. CutForge measures it against a control group of comparable designs that were never bundled, over the same months, so everything that happened to the whole shop cancels out. And where your shop has no control group, it says so and produces nothing rather than producing something worse.

Which of your five formats is anybody actually using?

The temptation is to drop the formats nobody mentions. That is the wrong test — a format nobody mentions may be the one quietly working. CutForge asks what each machine on your buyer list needs, not what it can open. A Cricut will import a PNG and then ask the buyer to trace it by hand, which is exactly when they message you instead.

How much of your shop is standing on somebody else’s trademark

Not a probability — nobody has those, and any tool offering you one has invented it. CutForge measures how much of the money rests on a mark you do not own, which is the figure that tells you the size of what is at stake. It also shows why the lost sales from a takedown are trivial and the risk is the account.

Twenty-one screens

The money — What An Order Is Worth (the flagship) · The Fee Stack · The Price Floor · Offsite Ads, which prints a break-even instead of a verdict because the verdict needs a number nobody has.

The catalogue — The Design Register · Bundles & Singles · Themes & Demand · Formats & Machines.

Being found — Listings, Views & Renewals, where renewals are the greater of the clock and the sales and never the sum — the mistake in every fee spreadsheet on the internet · The Six-Week Cliff, per theme and corrected for catalogue growth · How A Design Decays · The Upload Treadmill.

The risk — Trademark Exposure · Piracy & Takedowns · It Will Not Open, sorting every message by what would have prevented it · Reviews & Refunds.

Nine calculators

An order taken apart · the price floor · an advertising rate · a bundle against the singles · what the formats cost · keeping a listing on the shelf · a design over its life · the upload treadmill · what rests on a mark. Every one opens with your own figures already in it.

Twelve copy-ready pieces

A listing that answers the questions before they are asked · the “it will not open” reply · a licence in plain words · quoting an extended licence · a refund given quickly · a DMCA notice · appealing a takedown against you · the cull checklist to run before you list anything · a note to yourself before drawing a risky theme · a bundle listing that does not undercut the singles · and a quarterly review addressed to nobody but you.

What you get

• CutForge-Cut-File-Digital-Craft-Shop-Command-Center.html — the whole application, one file, offline
• CutForge-Companion-Workbook.xlsx — 12 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 designs, orders and fee figures stay in your own browser and are never transmitted anywhere.

Honest by design. A fee charged per order and a fee charged per file are never added into one percentage without the split being shown. A design listed last month has not failed to sell — every share is computed only over designs old enough to have been found, at a window you set and can move. The bundle cannibalisation needs a control group and refuses to produce a figure without one. Trademark exposure is a size and never a probability. And there is deliberately no hourly rate for a single year, because the money that arrived this year came from designs drawn across three — the two figures describe different populations and dividing one by the other describes neither.

CutForge performs arithmetic on figures you supply. It is not legal, tax or accounting advice. Marketplace terms, commercial-use licences, trademark and copyright questions, and what a licence described as “extended” actually permits are matters to take proper advice on rather than to settle from a template.