Project Profitability Calculator
See what a project actually made you.
Give it what you charged, your hours, your burn rate, and your direct costs. It hands back your real profit, your margin, what your business actually made per hour, and how much runway that project bought you.
Pricing is the number one thing coming up right now. Coaching calls, the community, our inbox... it's the same conversation everywhere. And most of that conversation is about charging more.
Charging more is half the answer. This is the other half.
Because a project can look great on the invoice and still lose money. We've watched it happen to some of the smartest creatives we know (and, honestly, it happened to us for years). The margin is what tells you the truth, and almost nobody looks at it.
One note: this tool is Ben's, not Maker Division's. It lives on his site at calc.mrbenburns.com and it's free for anyone.
How it works
You enter four things:
- What you charged
- Hours you spent (there's a helper if you only remember the start and end dates)
- Your hourly burn rate, which is what the business spends every working hour just to stay open. Don't know it? There's a two-minute worksheet built in.
- Direct costs: freelancers, fonts, stock, ad spend, processing fees
You get back your profit, your margin, what the business made per hour on that project, and the runway it bought you. Works on a finished project or one you're still pricing.
A quick example
Say you charged $3,000 for a website. It took 40 hours. Your burn rate is $25 an hour and you spent $200 on fonts and stock.
That's $1,000 of overhead and $200 of direct costs, so the project made $1,800. A 60% margin, and $45 an hour for the business. Not bad!
Now run the one where you "forgot" to bill for revisions.
Make sense?
One request
Run your last project through it, not your best one. The best one will make you feel good, and the last one will tell you the truth.
Nothing to buy, no catch on the other side, we promise.
