Print Quantity Planner
How many should you actually print? Tell us what the piece is, who it has to reach, how it gets distributed, and how long it has to stay current — and get a low, likely and high range instead of a number somebody guessed in a meeting. On the channels where the count is not really a guess, you get one number and a reason.
Pick the piece, how it gets distributed, how long it has to last, and how likely the content is to change.
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Print Quantity Planner FAQ
Built by SHIFT Design in Buffalo, MN — free to use, no sign-up. When you are ready to make it real, we design and print it.
Work it out from reach and distribution rather than from a round number. Take the people, addresses, or doors the piece has to cover across the whole window, apply what the distribution method actually consumes — one per address for mail, one per door on a walk route, roughly one per conversation when you hand it over, a pick-up rate when it sits in a rack — then add a spare. The honest answer is usually a range rather than a figure, which is why this tool returns a low, likely and high: the width of the band tells you how much of the order is genuinely a guess. Narrow it by putting a measured take-up rate into the tool, or by picking a channel where the count is not a guess at all.
Per piece, almost always. Fixed setup — file prep, proofing, plates, make-ready — costs the same whether the run is 100 or 1,000, so spreading it across more pieces drops the cost each; the quantity price break calculator shows how steep that curve is with your own numbers. In total, obviously not — and there is a second cost the curve hides. Pieces you never hand out are a 100% loss, not a discount. The deeper run is only cheaper if you actually use what you bought.
Then print fewer and print more often, and this planner will tell you so — unless you are mailing or walking a route, where the count is the list and a short shelf life changes how soon you reprint rather than how many you order. Anything with a shelf life turns unused stock into scrap on a specific day, which flips the usual volume logic on its head. Better still, design around it: keep the volatile content off the permanent piece with an insert, a sticker, or a QR code pointing at a page you can edit after the ink is dry.
The planner assumes 10% unless you change it, which is roughly the right instinct for most jobs. Pieces get creased, rained on, mailed as samples, handed out at something nobody planned for, and eaten by the inserter. The reason to build the spare into the first run instead of topping up later is that a short second run pays the full setup again across a much smaller quantity, so the top-up usually costs more per piece than the pieces you skipped.
Behind the numbers
There are only two questions inside a print quantity, and most people answer one of them. The first is how many pieces the job actually consumes: your reach multiplied by whatever the distribution method really uses up. The second — the one that gets skipped — is how long the artwork will still be true. A quantity is only correct inside a shelf life. This planner takes your reach across the whole window rather than per month, applies a low, likely and high multiplier for the way the piece gets distributed, adds your spare, then rounds the low end down and the likely and high ends up to a sensible run size. It answers with a band rather than a number, because a single figure here would be false precision dressed up as arithmetic.
What the reach figure means changes with the channel, and getting that backwards is the one mistake that will hand you a wrong answer. For mail, doors, and hand-to-hand, it is the people or addresses you have to reach, and the count runs at roughly one piece each. For a rack on a counter or a table at an event, it is footfall — how many people walk past or attend — and the count runs off a pick-up rate applied to that. Enter your target audience there instead of your traffic and the tool will tell you to print about a twelfth of what you need. For a poster or a table menu, it is the number of spots. The field hint spells this out, and the assumptions block under every result restates which one it used.
The methods are also not equally knowable. Mail and door drops are close to deterministic: one piece per address, one per door, plus a margin for blocks that get walked twice, samples, returns, and the pieces the inserter eats. That is why the tool stops pretending to give you a range there and hands you the count plus your spare instead — a mail quantity really is just the list count. The soft ones are the passive ones. A rack card on a counter and a stack on an event table both depend on a pick-up rate, and pick-up rates swing so hard with placement that a wide band is the only honest output. The 4–15% and 25–60% figures the planner starts from are our planning assumptions, not measured results, and they are labelled as such under every answer. If you want a real number, set out a counted stack of 100 and note how long it takes to go, then put that percentage into the take-up field. The band closes to one figure and you never have to trust our default again.
One thing the planner deliberately does not do is multiply your count by the length of the window. You give it reach across the whole window, so multiplying again would double-count. What the window changes is the advice: a year of stock against artwork that carries a price is a different decision from a year of stock against artwork that does not. The single exception is posted or displayed, where reach is a number of spots rather than a number of people, and time genuinely does drive replacement — and even there the low figure assumes nothing needs replacing, because whether it does is a stock question. A laminated or synthetic sheet outlasts an uncoated one by a wide margin in the same service; tell us how the piece gets handled and we will spec for it. See print finishes.
Quantity feels like a trick question because the two costs run in opposite directions. Fixed setup — file prep, proofing, plates, make-ready — is the same at 100 as it is at 1,000, so spreading it across more pieces drops the cost each, sometimes steeply. Put your own numbers into the quantity price break calculator and you will see where that curve flattens out, usually earlier than people expect. What the curve leaves out is the write-off. Print 2,000, use 600, and the 1,400 in the storeroom were not bought at a discount — they were bought at a 100% loss. The per-piece saving is a percentage; obsolete inventory is the whole thing. That is the half almost nobody models, and it is why the deep run looks obviously smart right up until the phone number changes.
So when the artwork carries something with an expiry date, the advice reverses: print fewer, print more often, and treat the higher cost per piece as the price of not printing something you cannot use. The better fix is structural — keep the volatile content off the permanent piece. A menu with a separate insert for the things that move. A business card without the direct dial that changes with the job title. A QR code that resolves to a page you can edit after the ink is dry. Decide the quantity first and the stock second — the paper picker handles that half — and whatever number you land on, you see a proof of it before anything runs. That is the last point where a change costs nothing but time: how it works.
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