Selling firewood? Price the load before you cut it. Free, no signup.
Editable starting point. What your hour is worth.
Editable starting point. Free logs = $0, bought logs = what you paid.
Editable starting points. Short 12 inch cuts take noticeably longer, most sellers forget that.
Editable starting points. Stacking runs $20 to $80 a cord in most areas.
Firewood sellers lose money on the load they never priced. A $200 cord sounds fine until the cutting, splitting, loading, delivery, and stacking hours get counted honestly. Start with your bar (40 dollars per hour), a profit margin percent (20), and your season take-home goal ($5,000). Pick a load preset: Rick / face cord, Full cord, or Pickup load, each filling stacked volume and cut length as editable starting points. Choose the wood type: oak and hickory are standard, hard-to-get hardwoods take 1.25 times longer on your labor, and softwood runs 0.8. Enter log cost for the load, then your time card: cutting, splitting, load plus unload, and fuel plus chain. Short 12 inch cuts get a time multiplier the tool applies automatically, because more cuts means more time. The delivery card takes drive round-trip minutes, miles, and truck cost per mile, and stacking is a separate toggle with its own minutes. Results show the true cost of the load, the recommended price (true cost plus margin, rounded up to $10), price per stacked cubic foot, your effective hourly rate, and the verdict. The gut check grades your instinct price, and the season planner turns your goal into loads.
Example only, not typical pricing. Full cord defaults at a $40 bar with 20 percent margin: 60 cutting minutes, 90 splitting, 45 load plus unload, 40 minute drive, 30 miles. Total is 235 minutes = 3.92 hours. Labor value is 3.92 x 40 = $156.67; vehicle is 30 x $0.67 = $20.10; log cost $60; fuel and chain $12. True cost = $248.77. Recommended price = ceil(248.77 x 1.20 / 10) x 10 = $300, or $2.34 per stacked cubic foot. Effective rate = (300 - 60 - 12 - 20.10) / 3.92 = $53.08 per hour, which clears 1.2 x the bar, so the verdict is PRICED RIGHT. A $200 gut quote would pay $27.55 per hour and leave $100 on the table. The season planner turns a $5,000 goal into profit of $51.23 per load, 98 loads, 382 total hours, and the flag fires: that is over 300 hours, a whole season of weekends.
Why do short cuts get a time multiplier?
Because 12 inch pieces mean more saw cuts than 16 inch pieces for the same volume. The tool multiplies your cutting minutes by 16 divided by your cut length, so the price reflects the extra work most sellers forget.
What does the wood-type multiplier do?
It scales the labor value, not the whole price. Hard-to-get hardwoods multiply your labor by 1.25 because they cut and split slower; softwood multiplies by 0.8. Log cost and truck cost stay the same.
Why is stacking a separate toggle?
Because stacking is optional and often unpaid. Turned on, its minutes count as labor at your bar; turned off, they do not. If you stack for free, turn it on and leave the minutes in, so the giveaway shows up in the effective rate.
What does the 300-hour flag mean?
The season planner warns when your goal needs more than 300 hours. It is a sanity check: price the loads right, but also be honest about whether you will cut that many.
What does the effective rate exclude?
It excludes log cost, fuel plus chain, and vehicle cost from the numerator, so it measures what your price pays you per hour of your own time. The verdict grades that against your bar.