How much should Etsy sellers and makers pay themselves?
Fees nibble every order, materials are bought in lumps, and December pays for March. The math below uses Kiln & Co., the demo studio inside Counsel.
Kiln & Co., a ceramics studio selling online, runs a 34% margin and clears a median $3,050 a month after every cost. Its worst honest month is $2,050. With $48,300 in the bank against $6,900 of monthly burn, it holds 7.0 months of runway.
The safe draw sits at or below the $3,050 median, with a written answer for how a $2,050 month gets bridged. A draw set above the median here would quietly spend the runway one month at a time.
Median of the last 6 to 8 months of profit as the ceiling; worst honest month as the floor; cash runway as the referee. The full method, including how to compute it by hand in ten minutes, is in the main pay-yourself guide, and the calculator sorts your months for you.
What is specific to Etsy sellers and makers
Compute profit after platform fees, payment fees, shipping, and materials, not after the ones you remember. Makers systematically overdraw because material buys are lumpy: the month you bought no clay looks richer than it is. A 12-month median smooths the lumps.
Connect Square, Stripe, Shopify, Etsy, QuickBooks, or your bank. Every answer carries a receipt: the method, the sample size, and the confidence. When the math is not conclusive, it says so.
Get Counsel on the App Store Try the web demoCounsel's rule, applied to its own content: every figure above is computed, sourced from our demo businesses or your own inputs, never invented. This is cash math, not tax or legal advice. Written and maintained by the founder.