Costs to Start a Laser Engraving Business

If you are thinking about getting into the laser engraving marketplace and you are just starting to put pen to paper, I’d like to share with you some general startup costs as I’ve done this myself over the last year.

With endless styles of lasers, things to produce, and others jumping into it, you can spend from just a few thousand dollars to literally hundreds of thousands.

Today, I’ll share with you my experience as a small, part-time engraver.

My Personal Experience

From my own experience, I’ve spent somewhere in the $4,000 range to get my enterprise up and running, that includes the lasers, which I’ll get to in a moment, the website domain and hosting, some equipment for pop-up markets, and of course the materials for engraving and selling.

Having started in the fall, I was able to make my first purchase of a Co2 laser from OMtech, I purchased the affordable ‘desktop’ engraver at 40 watts. There are some great things I love about it and some things I wish I had through threw before purchasing it.

The good:

• It’s very affordable, for less than $500 you can get a 40-watt laser engraver.

• It does a fairly great job at engraving most things that I need.

• Fairly simple to use, the manual and a couple of youtube videos later, I was able to make my very first engraving.

• It really is small compared to the much larger models of Co2 lasers.

The bad:

• You actually spend much more than $500, you need a water chiller (although it comes with a water pump for a bucket, avoid that and get a circulator/chiller) and air assist, which added a couple hundred more bucks, oh, and exhaust for my window.

• It is somewhat loud and smelly if you’re engraving certain things.

• The software that comes with it is, well, basic, although it gets the job done

• It’s not compatible with Lightburn, the most popular software out there for engraving.

• It’s slow compared to the larger, faster models.

• And the biggest issue I have is the board size, I can get 9” x 12” items into the laser, but anything else, forget it.

This is why I bought my second laser, the LaserPecker 2 with rotary.

Now this model does a couple of things like the K40 (the generic name for the OMTech 40) which includes engraving metal tumblers and it has a feature for long items, think 1x8 boards that are 6 ft long. It’s also portable too, so I can take it with me if needed.

It costs about $900 for the kit, and I use it some, but the K40 is my primary laser.

In all, just for the lasers and basic setup needs, I have roughly $2,000 into it, additional things like a table, power strips, and were bought along with it.

Domain, Hosting, and Marketing

I do technology for a living, so I’m great at databases, digital marketing, and SEO.

Do yourself a favor and choose a domain name that is a popular keyword, like ‘Your City Engraving Company’ and use Google Domains to purchase it. It’s about $12 a year, so it’s fairly affordable.

As for hosting, use something like Squarespace, which is a bit expensive, or Shopify. You can also use WordPress or Blogger which is free, but make sure you can have a place to blog, blogging is VERY important.

I like Squarespace and use that, which with a 20% discount code that can be found all over the place, runs me about $270 a year.

So, in all, about $300.

The ‘Stuff’ to Make

Finally, you have the materials that you need to engrave, make and sell. This can include things like wood, generic keychains, tumblers, leather items, cups, ornaments, decorations, or whatever you may want to offer.

With many different things to choose from, you will want to have some sort of ‘base’ of items you want to make and sell on your website, farmer’s markets, or popups in and around your area.

When I started my business here I spent about $600 on materials and about $150 on files in order to get what I needed to start. The files that I purchased were SVG files with premade images and other things that I could use to engrave along with various materials like my 8x10 wood panels and stone coasters.

$750 in materials to test, offer, and files.

So, you can start a laser engraving business with…

If you want to do the basics, you can start with roughly $3,000 to get things rolling, although many that get into it full-time spend far more, closer to $5,000 to $10,000.