Profit per unit
$18.00
Free calculator
Keystone pricing means doubling your cost. Type your cost and see the keystone price, or change the target margin to see a different rule instead of the classic 50%.
The calculator
The boxes start filled with an illustrative example, not a benchmark. Replace it with your own numbers.
What the item costs you, before it is priced for sale.
50% is the classic keystone rule: it doubles your cost. Change it to see what a different target margin does to the price instead.
Keystone price
A 50% target margin on an $18.00 cost prices the item at $36.00, exactly double the cost, which is the whole point of the keystone rule. Profit is $18.00 a unit.
price = cost / (1 - margin / 100) profit = price - cost
At exactly a 50% margin, this formula always doubles cost, which is why keystone pricing and "double the cost" are the same rule. Set the margin above or below 50% to price to a different target instead. This is a heuristic starting point, not a market-tested price.
See it on your own data Real numbers from your Shopify store, not a guess.
Keystone pricing is a heuristic starting point, not a market-tested price. Doubling cost tells you nothing about what a competitor charges for a similar item, what a category will actually bear, or whether customers will pay that price at all. It also only accounts for base product cost, not payment processing, shipping, or other variable costs, so the real margin an order clears will run lower than the target margin typed in above.
Use this as a quick check against the classic rule, then adjust for your own category and cost structure rather than treating the output as a final price.
Questions
Keystone pricing is the retail convention of pricing an item at exactly double its cost, a 50% margin. It's a shorthand rule of thumb rather than a calculation tied to any specific product or market, which is what makes it fast to apply and also why it doesn't fit every category equally well.
As a heuristic, sometimes. It varies hugely by category: some categories with thin freight and simple supply chains can sustain a 50% margin comfortably, while categories with expensive inputs, heavy per-unit shipping, or intense price competition often can't get anywhere near it. Treat keystone as a starting assumption to test, not a rule that applies everywhere.
Keystone pricing is really just margin-based pricing with the margin fixed at 50%. This calculator generalizes that: set the target margin field to 50% for the classic keystone case, or to any other percent to price to a different target using the same formula.
No. It's category-dependent. Products with low freight cost and simple sourcing can often clear it, while heavy, fragile, or highly competitive categories commonly can't sustain it without pricing themselves out of the market. Check the margin against what similar products in your category actually sell for before committing to it.
This calculator takes a target margin as the input and solves for the price that hits it, which is what keystone pricing needs, since keystone is defined by a margin (50%), not a markup. The markup calculator instead takes a markup percentage directly and shows you what margin that markup produces. They solve related problems from opposite directions.
Next
Upstream reads real per-SKU landed cost, real per-order shipping, and real payment fees straight from your store, so pricing decisions start from your actual numbers instead of a 50% rule of thumb.