A product that has made £130 profit sounds like a success. But if it took 22 hours to make, list and support, that is about £6 an hour. Another product with less profit might have taken a fraction of the time. Without looking at time, it is easy to keep making the products that work hardest for the least reward.
The calculation
Hourly rate = profit to date ÷ hours spent
Use profit after fees and costs, not the price buyers paid. The free Profit Calculator works out profit per sale, and the Profit Tracker shows profit to date for each product.
Count the hidden hours
Most sellers remember the design time and forget the rest. A fair count includes:
- research and planning,
- design and creation,
- mockups and preview images,
- writing the listing, title and tags,
- answering buyer questions,
- updates and fixes, and
- marketing, such as social media posts.
Mockups and listings alone can take as long as the product itself. Rough estimates are fine. Logging time as you go, even to the nearest half hour, is far better than guessing months later.
A worked example
Here are three products from the same shop, with profit to date and the hours they took:
| Weekly planner: £261.91 from 12.75 hours | £20.54 |
|---|---|
| Habit tracker: £92.35 from 9 hours | £10.26 |
| Budget workbook: £132.97 from 22 hours | £6.04 |
The budget workbook has made more profit than the habit tracker, but it took more than twice as long, so it earns the least per hour. The weekly planner earns more than three times as much per hour as the workbook.
Has the product paid you back?
Choose an hourly rate you would be happy to earn, say £15. Multiply it by the hours a product took to find the profit it needs to reach that rate. The budget workbook took 22 hours, so it needs £330 of profit to pay back the time at £15 an hour. It has made £132.97 so far, so it still needs about £197.
That does not make it a failure. Digital products can keep selling for years without more work, so the hourly rate rises with every sale. A new product will always look worse than an older one. Compare products of a similar age, and check again in a few months.
What to do with the numbers
- Make more of what earns well per hour. If planners earn three times what workbooks do, that is a strong hint about what to make next.
- Find where the time goes. If mockups take a quarter of your time, a reusable mockup template could pay for itself quickly.
- Watch support time. A product that keeps generating questions costs more than it seems. Better instructions can fix that.
- Check your prices. If a product takes a long time to make and sells steadily, it may be underpriced. The Pricing Calculator helps you test a new price.
Track it without the maths
The free True Hourly Rate Tracker lets you log time by product and task, enter profit to date, and see your hourly rate for each product and overall, which products have paid back, and where your hours go.
The figures in this article are examples. Your hourly rate is a planning guide, not a measure of whether a product is worth keeping on its own.