Know your craft.

The problem

Every maker hits the same wall: am I actually making money on this? Spreadsheets miss something. Etsy fees compound. Failed pieces quietly bleed margin. The cost calculators you find online are toys: pick a material cost, multiply, done. They don't know what your machine cost, what your time is worth, or what Etsy is going to take when someone buys.

So you keep selling. And you keep wondering if any of it pays.

Why we built it

Getting into a new hobby has always had this turn-off baked in. You make something good, then you sit on it because you don't know what to charge. Too low and you're working for free; too high and you imagine someone scoffing at the listing. The calculators online are toys, the math feels like guessing, and the doubt is loud enough to make selling feel sketchy. We needed something that would take the guessing game out, show the math line by line, and let us trust the number we put on a price tag. So we built it.

When we opened a few storefronts of our own, the fee math piled on. Every marketplace takes its own cut, on top of payment processing, on top of listing fees. Some shops do free shipping over a threshold and some don't. Keeping all of that straight across multiple channels was a spreadsheet sprawl waiting to happen. Anvil HUD is the central, all-in-one companion we kept wishing existed. Built for ourselves first, but designed for any maker tired of guessing.

We wanted a workbench. Not a spreadsheet. Not a black box. A tool that shows its work, line by line, so you can argue with the number when it looks wrong, and trust it when it looks right.

What Anvil HUD is

Drop a file or enter your inputs (a G-code for a print, an SVG for a cut, the grams for a pour). The engine layers in everything: material, the machine or mold, your labor, packaging, failure buffer, overhead, your target margin, the channel's fees. The breakdown is visible at every step, every value next to where it came from.

Save the result. Tag it with the shops you sell on. The same product shows you what to charge on your own site versus on Etsy with their cut baked in. Queue jobs. Log outcomes. The failure-rate buffer in the math gets replaced by your shop's real rate the moment you have enough data. Pricing sharpens as you ship.

How it grew

It all started with an hourly-researched 3D printing calculator: one stubborn question about whether our own prints actually made money, and a refusal to trust a number we couldn't see the work behind. That calculator turned into an engine, and the engine turned out to fit far more than filament.

Because every craft prices the same way: a real material cost, a real machine cost, a real time cost, and a real marketplace cut. So Anvil HUD grew into an all-around workbench for makers of every kind. Eleven crafts are live today, from 3D printing, laser, and resin to candles, soap, vinyl, embroidery, sewing, crochet, pottery, and woodworking, each researched the same careful way the first one was. Then it grew past making: ten trades, from renovation and handyman to roofing and concrete, build a bottom-up bid on the same honest math.

Whatever you make. Know your craft.

Who's behind it

Anvil HUD is built by Jason, Robin, and Colby. We started with t3dpg.com, our first storefront, and added dijaroswares.com from there. Between them we cover everything from functional home decor to playful articulated toys. We're open to custom projects too: if you've got a dream you want help making real, we're game.

Anvil HUD sits alongside Telemtrie, our web analytics tool, and Meridian Dynamics, a Star Citizen companion. All from the same place. Makers solving the problems we kept running into ourselves.