For laser & CNC engravers
LightBurn runs your laser. What runs your prices?
Your software drives the machine beautifully — but it never tells you what a piece cost to make or what margin you kept. Batchnook costs every tumbler, sign, and plaque from the blank plus your machine time, so a twelve-minute engrave is never sold for the price of a bare blank.
Made for the shop
The blank, the minutes, and the packaging — all in the cost, and a margin that keeps up.
Machine time is a material
Work out an hourly rate for your machine — the laser tube or spindle, power, and maintenance over its life — and add a material called machine minutes. Buy a block of minutes at that rate (here, fifteen cents a minute), and each design simply spends the minutes it takes. A long engrave now costs what it actually costs.
Blank prices moved — watch your margins
Snap the receipt from a tumbler or sheet-stock order and Batchnook re-costs every piece at once, by the moving-average method. Set a target margin and it flags the designs that slipped under it — the ones to re-price before your next craft fair or drop.
Batches and orders, tracked
Log a run — “engraved 20 tumblers” — and stock plus unit cost update together. Record a market or Etsy order in a couple of taps; revenue and period cost of goods track themselves, never metered. Run as many machines as you like.
Costing machine minutes, plainly
You already know roughly what an hour on the machine is worth: the machine's price over the hours you'll get from it, plus power and maintenance. Turn that into a per-minute number and it becomes a material like any other. Add “machine minutes” once, buy a block of them at your rate — say 500 minutes for $75, which is fifteen cents a minute — and every recipe spends the minutes that piece takes. When your rate changes, you record a new purchase and every design re-costs itself. No new kind of thing to learn; a minute is just another unit you buy.
What a piece really earns you
Fold the minutes into the cost and the “it's just a $3 blank” math falls apart. Try a typical 12×12 sign, then run it on your own pieces.
Blank, tape & machine time per sign
- Birch plywood blank (12×12)$3.50
- Laser time — 20 min @ $0.15/min (amortized machine + power)$3
- Transfer tape$0.50
- What one unit costs you$7
Typical 2026 numbers — a starting point, not a quote. In the app, these come off your receipts and update themselves.
Your margin at this price
75%
At or above your target — healthy.
Profit per unit
$21
Price to hit your target
$23.34
Want this done for you?
Batchnook keeps this margin current from a receipt photo — no re-entering numbers. Join the waitlist and the founding offer for makers opens to you first.
This is the same margin Batchnook shows on every product — what's left after the blank and machine time, as a share of price. Start free to run it on your own receipts, no card.
Three pieces, costed the same way
Blank plus machine minutes plus packaging — the exact costs the starter pack lands with.
Engraved tumbler
- Costs you
- $5.20
- Sells for
- $22.00
- Margin kept
- 76%
12×12 engraved sign
- Costs you
- $7.00
- Sells for
- $28.00
- Margin kept
- 75%
Award plaque
- Costs you
- $8.80
- Sells for
- $30.00
- Margin kept
- 71%
Start with a laser pack, not a blank screen
New accounts can load a laser engraving starter pack — tumbler, sign, and plaque blanks, transfer tape, packaging, and a machine-minutes material at a starter rate, with three costed pieces to start from — so the margin math is working from your first session. Swap in your own blanks and your real per-minute rate whenever you like. It fits the free plan as-is.
Start with the laser packThe deal, plainly
- The price you join at is yours.
- No order-line meters, ever.
- Your data walks free — export everything, always.
- Tax-ready numbers, never tax advice.
Free is real — no card, no countdown. See pricing for the whole table.