Two charges, two completely different jobs
Your first invoice has an art fee and a setup fee, and they look like the same thing charged twice. They are not. One happens on a screen, the other happens on a press, and only one of them can ever be automated away.
Digital work on your file: rebuilding the logo as vector, splitting it into one layer per ink, setting spot colours, outlining text, cleaning up stray points.
It is a defined transformation. Software does it in seconds when the source is reasonable.
Physical work in the shop: coating a screen with emulsion, exposing it to burn in your image, washing out, drying, then registering it on the press so every colour lands in the right place. Once per colour.
Someone has to physically make and align the screens. No file changes that.
This is worth being blunt about, because plenty of tools imply otherwise: nothing removes the setup fee. It is labour on a physical object, charged once and then spread across however many pieces you order — which is exactly why the per-shirt price falls so sharply between 25 and 250.
The half you can actually remove
If you are the customer: supply a camera-ready file and the art fee has nothing to bill for. If you never had the vector, convert what you do have and check it before you send it.
If you are the shop: this is the line item that eats your art person's day and comes back to you as a supplier invoice. The routine files convert automatically; keep your art time for the ones that genuinely need a human — sketches, photos of samples, anything where somebody has to decide what the mark is meant to be.
Questions on both sides of the counter
Because two separate jobs happened. Someone made your file printable — that is the art fee. Then someone built the physical screens and lined them up on the press — that is the setup. Neither one existed before you ordered, and the second cannot start until the first is finished.
Each ink needs its own screen: coated with emulsion, exposed to burn in the image, washed out, dried, then registered on the press so it lands exactly on top of the others. Four colours means four of those, plus the alignment between them.
Usually the setup does, if the shop keeps your screens or your separations on file — ask, because policies differ. The art fee should not recur at all once the file exists, and if it does, ask why.
Yes, by supplying artwork that is already print-ready: vector, at final size, text outlined, colours specified. That is what "camera-ready" means. If you do not have that file, you either pay someone to make it or you make it yourself.
Probably not. Published art charges commonly sit around $50 an hour billed in 15-minute increments, and rebuilding a logo properly takes 25 to 40 minutes. Figures observed across published pricing, checked August 2026. If a quote looks far outside that, ask what it covers — there is usually a reason, like a redraw from a photograph.
Separate the two on the quote and name them differently. Customers push back on a single opaque "prep" line and accept two specific ones. Sending them a page like this before they see the invoice removes most of the conversation.
If artwork prep for customers is your business, you are probably paying per file.
An outside art service charges 6 to 26 dollars a logo and comes back the next day. Redrawing it yourself costs half an hour you could bill. A year here is $49 for 25 conversions every month, every machine format included, which works out cheaper than two outsourced logos.
Everything on this page stays free. This is only worth it if you do volume.