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The price of a printed garment is a structure — setup, per-unit rate, blank and shipping — and each method's structure favours a different quantity.
Setup is the first line item. Screen printing charges a setup for every screen colour in the design, so a four-colour print carries four setups before a single garment is printed. DTG has no setup at all. Embroidery skips setup in the screen sense but is priced per stitch count, with a typical left-chest logo at 3,000-8,000 stitches, and vinyl stays cheap only while the design holds at one or two colours.
The per-unit rate runs the other way. Screen printing is the cheapest per garment once the setup is paid for, which is why it suits runs from roughly 50 to 5,000 pieces in the same colour count. DTG is priced per garment at a flat rate and is slower per hour than screen printing, so its advantage shrinks as the run grows.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
The break-even point is where setup divided by run size drops below DTG's per-garment premium — in practice near the 50-piece boundary where the two methods' run ranges meet. Below it, paying setups for a small run is the classic overspend; above it, staying on DTG means paying a flat rate for work a press would do cheaper.
The blank is a separate cost driver. Gildan, Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Bella+Canvas cover most of the US print-on-demand catalogue, and weight is quoted in GSM — 180 gsm for a standard t-shirt, 320-380 gsm for fleece — so the garment choice moves the total independently of the print method.
Finally, time is part of the budget. Production typically takes 3-7 business days for screen printing and DTG before shipping, and domestic shipping adds 2-8 business days, so an event date should be backed out from a 5-15 business-day window. For the method choice itself, see Choosing a print method; for the file that has to survive the run, see Preparing artwork that actually prints.
Further reading