Selling price calculator: how much to charge so the math works
Add up what the unit really cost — invoice, freight, packaging and loss — and say how much goes out of each sale in tax, commission, overhead and intended profit. The price appears with its composition laid open: how much of that amount goes to each destination.
No sign-up, no email, no free trial: the page answers the same on the first calculation and the hundredth. The math runs in your browser, and the link below the result carries the numbers ready for whoever approves the price list.
Calculate your product's selling price
Add up what the unit cost, enter what comes out of each sale and see the price with its composition laid open. No sign-up, and with a link to send the finished calculation.
Unit selling price
R$ 182.76
That is R$ 106.00 of cost fitting into what has no destination yet: the other four lines have already reserved 42% of everything charged.
| Destination | Amount |
|---|---|
| Unit cost | R$ 106.00 |
| Taxes on the sale(8%) | R$ 14.62 |
| Commission and collection(4%) | R$ 7.31 |
| Working capital(2%) | R$ 3.66 |
| Contribution margin(28%) | R$ 51.17 |
| Selling price | R$ 182.76 |
- Result of this sale
- R$ 18.27
The contribution of this unit is R$ 51.17, and R$ 32.90 of it pays for the slice of overhead it carries (18% of the price). The amount above is what stays with the company after that.
Link to this calculation
The link opens the calculator with these same numbers. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
The selling price formula
Three steps: work out what the unit really cost, work out how much of the amount charged already has a destination before the unit is paid for, and find out what is left once overhead has been allocated.
The first step adds up everything that varies with the unit. The second adds up the percentages that come out of the selling price, not out of the cost — taxes, commission and collection fees, working capital and the intended contribution margin. The price is one divided by the other:
unit cost = invoice + allocated freight + packaging + loss provision
committed = taxes + commission + working capital + contribution margin
selling price = unit cost ÷ ((100 − committed) ÷ 100)
Adding the invoice, the allocated freight and whatever else the unit required, the cost in the example is R$ 106.00; with 42% committed, 58% of the price is left to pay for it. The price is R$ 106.00 divided by 0.58, that is, R$ 182.76. Of that amount, R$ 14.62 goes to tax, R$ 7.31 to commission and collection, R$ 3.66 to the cost of the term and R$ 51.17 is left as contribution margin.
Notice what is not in the divisor: fixed expense. Rent, payroll and electricity are not born of this sale — they are paid by the sum of the month's contributions. That is why allocation is the third step, not the second:
sale result = contribution margin − allocated fixed expense
price with IPI = price × (1 + IPI)
Of the R$ 51.17 of contribution, R$ 32.90 pays for overhead — the 18% it weighs on revenue — and R$ 18.27 remains, or 10% of the price. The distinction between the two numbers decides different things: contribution tells you how far to discount and what to promote; the result tells you whether the month closes. IPI, when it exists, comes after all of this — it is added to the price, not deducted from it.
Notice also what is not in the formula: the competitor's price. The calculation answers how much the operation needs to receive, and that is a different question from how much the market pays. Both need an answer, and whoever skips the first discounts without knowing where the discount is coming from.
The final division is the markup, and the number the cost was divided by — 0.58 — is the markup divisor. The markup calculator answers that index on its own, which is the useful format when the question is not the price of one item but the rule for the whole catalog.
Cost is not the invoice value
Four items that arrive after the purchase and almost never make it into the calculation. Together they usually account for ten percent of a unit's cost.
Recoverable tax is not cost — and non-recoverable tax is
Anyone on the presumed or actual profit regime who is entitled to ICMS, PIS and Cofins credits on purchases does not really pay those taxes: they come back. The cost is the invoice value minus the credit. Someone on Simples Nacional recovers nothing, and the cost is the full amount. Using the same number under both regimes gets the cost wrong by double-digit percentages, and the error lands in full on the price.
Purchase freight is a product cost, not a monthly expense
Booking freight as an administrative expense takes it out of each unit's cost and returns it diluted in the overhead allocation, where no one sees it. The right calculation is to divide the freight on the load by the units that came in it, and the result changes from purchase to purchase: the same item can cost more on a partial delivery than on a full load.
Breakage is a provision, and it exists even when nobody writes it down
Loss, damage, theft and expiry happen at a known percentage of every operation. Anyone who does not provision for them does not stop paying: they pay it all at once, at inventory count, against the period's result. A 2% provision on a cost of R$ 106.00 adds a little over two reais to the unit and shows up in the price instead of in the surprise on the balance sheet.
Packaging, labels and preparation go in per unit
Bags, boxes, tape, price tags and assembly time are cheap per piece and far from negligible over a year. They belong in this field because they vary with the unit sold — and not in the fixed-expense allocation, where they would end up split equally between a product that needs assembly and one that arrives from the supplier ready for the shelf.
What the price composition reveals
The price is a number; its composition is a different conversation with whoever asks for a discount, whoever complains it is too expensive and whoever approves the price list.
Contribution in reais is bigger than the percentage suggests
A contribution margin of 28% applied to a unit of R$ 106.00 returns R$ 51.17, and not the 28% of the cost that direct multiplication suggests. The reason is that the slice is taken from what you charge, not from what you paid for the item. Read the other way around, this same calculation is what makes someone think they are pricing with room to spare until they open the quarter's result.
Contribution is not profit, and the difference has a name
The R$ 51.17 that remain from this sale are not yet yours: R$ 32.90 of it pays for the share of overhead this sale carries, and what is left is R$ 18.27 — 10% of the price. The two numbers serve different decisions. Contribution decides discounts, promotions and what leaves the mix, because the rent keeps being charged when the item leaves the catalog. The result is what you compare with the month's close.
Tax and fees grow with the price, and the cost does not
Every real added to the price carries along 8% in tax, 4% in collection fees and 2% in working capital. That is why a ten percent price increase does not become ten percent more contribution: it becomes less. And that is also why a ten percent discount does not cost ten percent of the contribution — it costs far more.
The discount comes almost entirely out of the last line
The cost is the only line that does not shrink along with the price. A discount of 5% on R$ 182.76 takes R$ 9.14 off what you charge; tax, commission and working capital fall with it, but only in proportion to themselves, and the R$ 106.00 for the item stays whole. Contribution falls from R$ 51.17 to R$ 43.32: 5% off the price became 15.34% of what that sale used to deliver. Overhead, for its part, did not fall — after paying it, R$ 10.42 is left, and that is the calculation that should be on the screen of whoever authorizes a discount.
IPI is not your margin, and should not be in the base
When the operation itemizes IPI, the invoice total is larger than the price the calculation produced — the tax is added on top and passed through in full. Measuring margin on the invoice total inflates every company indicator at once, because the denominator grew without anything extra being left over. That is why revenue with IPI and revenue without IPI are two numbers, and only the second is fit to measure price.
A calculated price is not a charged price
The calculation says how much the operation needs to receive; it does not say how much the market pays. When the calculated price sits above what a competitor charges, the answer is rarely to cut contribution: it is to find which of the other lines is out of range — purchase cost, tax, collection fee or the term the operation finances — and attack that one.
The same calculation, repeated with every invoice that comes in
This calculator solves the price of one product. It keeps solving it as long as the calculation can be redone by hand on the items that matter, and for most companies that lasts quite a while.
What no calculator does is redo fifteen thousand prices on its own when the purchase cost goes up, when the tax rate changes by NCM code and destination state, or when the share of installment card sales grows two points in the month's revenue. That is the job of RevPrice: it pulls the cost from the ERP with every invoice that comes in, keeps the margin policy in one place and records the author, date and reason for every price changed.
Before that, it is worth seeing where the spreadsheet still copes and where it breaks. Switching tools too early is expensive, and that page measures the moment by criteria you can count.