One of the most common questions we get is some version of: “How do I get good custom shirts without spending a fortune?” It’s a fair question — especially for small businesses, school groups, and nonprofits working with a tight budget. The good news is there are real ways to keep the cost down without ending up with shirts you’re embarrassed to hand out. Here’s how we help people do it.
Order more at once, not in small batches
This is the single biggest lever on price. Screen printing has up-front setup work — preparing artwork and burning a screen for each color — and that cost is the same whether you print 24 shirts or 144. So the more shirts you order in one run, the lower the cost per shirt. If you know you’ll need more later, it’s almost always cheaper to order them now than to come back for a second small batch and pay the setup again.
Keep the design to fewer colors
Each ink color in your design is its own screen, and each screen adds to the setup. A clean one- or two-color design costs noticeably less to print than a six-color one — and honestly, simple designs often look sharper on a shirt anyway. If budget is the priority, we’ll help you simplify a design down to fewer colors without losing what makes it work.
Choose the right blank for the job
You don’t always need the premium shirt. We stock economy, standard, and premium blanks, and for a lot of projects — giveaways, one-time events, casual staff shirts — a solid economy blank does the job at a lower price. We’ll be straight with you about where it’s worth spending a little more (shirts people will wear for years) versus where the economy option is perfectly fine.
Affordable doesn’t mean cheap
Here’s the part we care about: keeping costs down should never mean a print that cracks after three washes. The savings come from smart choices — quantity, color count, garment tier — not from cutting corners on the printing itself. Every order gets the same properly-cured, quality print regardless of which blank you picked. A budget shirt should still be a good shirt.
We’ll help you find the sweet spot
If you tell us your budget and what you’re trying to do, we’ll work backward to find the combination of quantity, colors, and garment that gets you there. No setup fees on most orders, no hidden costs, and an honest recommendation before you commit.
Get a quote and let us know what you’re working with — we’ll help you make it work.
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