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Confusing markup with margin is the most expensive arithmetic mistake in small business. Enter your costs and target margin — get the price you should quote.
The Operations Kit ($19) includes the pricing worksheets that keep markup vs margin straight on every quote — fill in once, reuse forever.
Markup-vs-margin table plus the three costs most owners forget to include in a quote.
Margin is profit as a percentage of the price. Markup is profit as a percentage of the cost. They're different numbers for the same job, and mixing them up quietly erodes profit on every quote.
A 30% margin needs a 42.9% markup. If you add 30% to cost thinking you've got a 30% margin, you actually earn about 23% — and you've given away roughly a quarter of your profit without noticing.
Price = total cost ÷ (1 − margin).
Markup % = (price − cost) ÷ cost × 100.
The costs above are the direct ones. Insurance, vehicle, phone, software and the hours spent quoting are real too — they come out of the profit shown here. If your margin only just covers overhead, the job pays you nothing for the risk of doing it.
We build automations that generate quotes from a form and chase them on a schedule — so pricing right doesn't cost you the night.
Book a one hour AI automation audit. You get a written plan ranked by payoff, with the tools and a realistic cost for each. From 49 dollars, delivered in two days.