If you have called three shops for a price on 50 shirts and gotten three answers that are nowhere near each other, you are not being hustled. Screen printing is priced on two separate things that most quotes never separate out: the one-time cost of making the screens, and the per-shirt cost of running them.

Once you understand those two numbers, every quote you get from here on makes sense — including ours.

The setup cost: one screen per color, every time

Screen printing pushes ink through a mesh screen. Each color in your design needs its own screen, burned and aligned by hand before anything gets printed. That labor happens whether you are ordering 24 shirts or 2,400.

This is the single biggest thing people get wrong. A four-color design is not “a bit more” than a one-color design. It is four screens instead of one, four passes on the press, and four times the registration work to keep it lined up. On a small run, artwork colors can easily cost more than the shirts.

The practical takeaway: if your budget is tight and your run is small, reducing your design to one or two colors will save you more money than anything else on this page.

The per-shirt cost: quantity is doing most of the work

Once the screens exist, printing is fast. That is why screen printing gets dramatically cheaper as the quantity climbs — you are spreading a fixed setup across more pieces while the marginal cost of each shirt barely moves.

Twenty-four shirts is roughly where screen printing starts to beat the alternatives. Below that, the setup dominates and you are usually better off with DTF, which has no screens at all. We will tell you when that is the case rather than taking the screen-printing order.

The five things that actually move your number

Number of ink colors. One screen per color. This is the big lever.
Quantity. The setup is fixed, so the price per shirt falls fast between 24 and 144 pieces.
Number of print locations. A front and a back are two separate print runs, not one job with extra ink.
The garment. A basic cotton tee and a heavyweight hoodie are not the same blank, and the gap between them is often larger than the print cost.
Dark garments. Printing light ink on a dark shirt needs an underbase — a white layer printed first — which is effectively one more color and one more pass.

Where DTF changes the math

Direct-to-film printing has no screens. That means no setup cost, no color limit, and no penalty for a photographic design with forty colors in it. For small runs, full-color artwork, or a dozen shirts with different names on them, DTF is usually the cheaper and better answer.

Screen printing wins on volume and on feel. At a few hundred pieces in one or two colors, nothing beats it on price, and the ink sits in the fabric in a way DTF does not quite match. We run both, so we have no reason to push you toward one.

Why we quote instead of publishing a price list

We could publish “screen printed tees from $X” and it would be true for exactly one combination of colors, quantity, garment and placement — and misleading for every other one. You would either be quoted more than the advertised number later, or we would have padded the number so it is safe, which means you overpay.

Send us the artwork, the quantity and the garment you have in mind and you get a real number, usually the same day. No account, no minimum order to ask.

Three ways to bring the price down without cheapening the job

Drop a color. Most logos survive being simplified to two colors, and on a small run the saving is significant.
Consolidate the order. Two departments ordering 40 shirts each will pay more than one order of 80.
Print one location. A left chest print often reads better than a full front anyway, and it is one run instead of two.

Ordering screen printing in Staten Island

We are a Staten Island shop. Screen printing runs through a print partner we trust, and we handle the artwork, the proof and the quality check here, so you deal with one local shop from start to finish. That means we can look at your artwork before you commit, tell you honestly whether screen printing or DTF is the right method, and hand the order to you locally with no shipping cost at all.

Send your artwork and quantity for a real quote: request a quote, or call (929) 487-3382.