How to Quote a Custom Jewelry Commission Without Underpricing It

Custom work is the highest-margin thing most jewelers do, and the easiest to underprice. A stock piece gets priced once and sits on the shelf. A commission gets priced under time pressure, in front of a client, for a design that doesn't exist yet, built from materials whose cost changed since last week.

The jewelers who make money on commissions aren't the ones charging the most. They're the ones who quote from a complete cost basis every time, so a 55% gross margin is actually 55% and not 30% after the parts they forgot to count.

This is the full breakdown: every line that belongs in a commission quote, a worked example on a real ring, and how to keep the number honest when gold moves between the quote and the invoice.

Why a commission quote isn't the same as pricing a stock piece

When you price a piece you make regularly, you already know what it costs. You've built it before. The metal weight is settled, the stones are consistent, the bench time is predictable. You can apply a pricing formula and move on. (If that's the problem you're solving, our guide to pricing handmade jewelry covers the formulas.)

A commission has none of that certainty. The design is new. The client wants a 1.5ct oval sapphire instead of the round you usually set, which changes the head, the finger-fit, and the setting time. The metal weight is an estimate until the piece is cast. And you're quoting a fixed price today for work you'll finish in six weeks, at a gold price you can't see yet.

So a commission quote is really two jobs. First, estimate the cost basis as tightly as you can. Second, decide what margin turns that cost into a price you'll still be happy with when the piece is done.

The line items that belong in the quote

Most underpriced commissions aren't off by a lot on any one line. They're off by a little on five lines that add up. Here's everything that belongs in the cost basis before you apply margin.

Metal

Estimate the finished weight, then price it at your actual metal cost, not last quarter's. For a cast piece, work from a model weight or a comparable piece you've made. A 14K yellow gold ring in a size 6.5 might finish around 9.4g depending on the profile and the shank.

Your metal cost per gram comes off spot. At a gold spot of $2,650/troy oz, pure gold is about $85.20/g. 14K is 58.5% gold, so the fine-metal value is roughly $49.85/g, and casting grain runs a few percent over that. Call it $52/g for 14K yellow. Get the karat math wrong and every quote inherits the error, so it's worth keeping a purity reference handy (our gold karat purity chart lists fineness and cost per gram at spot).

Metal loss

You never recover every gram you pour. Sprue, filing, polishing, and scrap that doesn't make it back into the crucible all cost you. Depending on your process and how disciplined your scrap recovery is, plan on losing somewhere between 5 and 12% of the gross metal. If you quote only the finished weight, you're giving that away on every piece.

Stones

Price the center stone and the accents at what you'll actually pay to source them, including any memo or shipping cost. If you're setting a client's own stone, it doesn't go in the cost basis, but the risk of setting it does, and that belongs in your labor rate. Carat weight, cut, and cert all move the number, so track stones by the piece rather than by a rough average (more on that in our gemstone inventory guide).

Findings and consumables

Clasps, posts, jump rings, solder, wax, burs, polishing compound, rhodium if the piece is white gold. Individually they're small. Across a year of commissions they're real money, and they belong in the recipe.

Outsourced work

If you send the piece out to a caster, a setter, an engraver, or a plater, their charge is a hard cost. Add it to the basis at what the vendor invoices you, not what you hope it'll be. A caster who quotes $45 for a single ring is a $45 line item.

Labor

The line most likely to be undercounted, because it's your own time and it doesn't feel like a cost. It is. Break it into the real stages and rate each one:

• Design and CAD. Consultation, sketches, CAD modeling, revisions. On a first-time commission this is often two or more hours before a single gram of metal is touched.
• Fabrication. Bench time to build, assemble, and finish the piece.
• Setting. Priced by the stone. A center stone plus six accents is more setting time than the fabrication looks like it should need.

Pick an hourly rate that pays you a wage plus your shop overhead, and apply it honestly. If your bench rate is $75/hr and a commission takes six hours across design, build, and setting, that's $450 that has to be in the price before margin.

A worked example: 14K sapphire ring

Here's a full quote for a custom 14K yellow gold ring with a 1.5ct oval sapphire and six accent diamonds at 0.18 ctw. Every line from above, costed out.

Line item	Detail	Cost
14K yellow gold	9.4g @ $52.00/g	$488.80
Metal loss allowance	8% of metal	$39.10
Oval sapphire	1.5ct, sourced	$340.00
Accent diamonds	6 stones, 0.18 ctw	$126.00
Findings and consumables	solder, wax, polish	$18.00
Casting (outsourced)	single ring	$45.00
Design and CAD	2.5 hr @ $75/hr	$187.50
Fabrication	4 hr @ $75/hr	$300.00
Setting	2 hr @ $85/hr	$170.00
Total cost basis		$1,714.40

The materials come to $1,011.90. Labor and outsourced work come to $702.50. Notice that on a piece like this, your time is roughly 40% of the cost. Any quote that treats labor as a rounding error is going to land low.

This is a bill of materials, in other words, plus labor and loss. If you build the same designs repeatedly, saving the recipe once and adjusting per commission beats rebuilding it every time. Our guide to jewelry BOMs walks through structuring one that stays accurate.

Margin: markup and gross margin aren't the same number

This trips up a lot of jewelers, and it costs them. A 2x markup is not a 50% margin. Markup is measured against your cost. Margin is measured against your price.

Take the $1,714.40 basis. Double it to $3,428.80 and that's a 2x markup, but your gross margin is 50% because half the price is cost. If you actually want a 55% gross margin, you divide the cost by 0.45:

Price = cost basis / (1 − target margin) = $1,714.40 / 0.45 = $3,809.78

Round that to a $3,800 quote. Many shops carry a higher multiplier on stones than on metal and labor, and that's fine, as long as the blended result clears the margin you need to run the business. Decide the target first, then let the math set the price. Quoting the other way around, picking a price that feels right and hoping the margin is there, is how commissions end up profitable on paper and thin in the bank.

Put an expiration date on the quote

Your $3,800 quote is only true at $2,650 gold. Metal is the one input that can move meaningfully between the day you quote and the day you invoice, and a custom piece can take weeks.

Say gold climbs 10% to $2,915/troy oz before you cast. Your 14K cost goes from $52 to about $57.20/g. On 9.4g plus loss, that's roughly $53 more in raw cost, which at a 55% margin should have added about $118 to the price. On one ring it's an annoyance. Across a book of commissions during a gold run, it's your margin quietly leaking out. (Our COGS guide gets into how much a moving spot price erodes margin over a full catalog.)

Two habits fix this. Date every quote and give it a validity window, something like "valid for 14 days at current metal prices." And build the quote from a live metal cost rather than a number you typed in three weeks ago, so the basis is current the moment you generate it.

What to actually show the client

You don't hand a client the full cost table. Showing your metal loss allowance and your bench rate invites a negotiation you don't want. But you also don't quote a single bare number with no context, because that reads as arbitrary and it's harder to defend.

The middle ground works best. Present the quote grouped into a few honest categories:

• Materials. Metal and stones, as a combined figure.
• Craftsmanship. Design, fabrication, and setting, as your labor.
• The total, with the validity window and the deposit terms.

This shows the client that a real number sits behind the price, which builds trust, without exposing your cost structure or your margin. It also makes a change of scope easy to re-quote later. When a client asks to swap the sapphire for a larger stone, you adjust one line and the total updates, instead of starting the whole estimate over.

How Forge builds the quote

Forge's custom order module is built around this exact flow. It's part of the Studio tier, alongside repairs, serialized stones, and the jewelry-aware CRM.

You start a custom order from the client record, describe the piece in structured fields, and build the quote as a bill of materials pulled from your real inventory. Metal at your current cost per gram, stones from stock or sourced, findings, and a loss allowance on the recipe. Add your labor stages at your rates, set a target margin, and Forge calculates the price and shows you the margin before you send anything. If the commission is a variation on a piece you already make, link the existing recipe and adjust from there rather than rebuilding it.

On the Workshop tier, live metal pricing keeps the metal line current against gold, silver, platinum, and palladium spot automatically, so a quote you generate today reflects today's market instead of the price you last entered. When the client approves, the quote becomes a build order that reserves and deducts the materials as you make the piece, and deposits invoice through Shopify. The estimate, the production, and the money stay attached to one order.

Where this leaves you

Underpricing a commission almost never comes from charging too little on purpose. It comes from a quote that was missing a line, or built on a gold price that had already moved. Fix the estimate and the pricing takes care of itself.

Count everything. Separate markup from margin. Date the quote. Do that on every commission and your best work stops being your least profitable. For the broader picture of running commissions from intake to delivery, see our guide to managing custom jewelry orders on Shopify.

Questions about quoting commissions? Email hello@startforge.app. We read every one.