Your shop runs on six tools that don't talk to each other

A quote in a spreadsheet. Sizes in a group chat. The schedule on a whiteboard. Shipping in a browser tab. And the person holding all of it together is you, at 9pm, on a Tuesday.

Operator Stack builds software for print shops. Three products you can start using this afternoon, and custom systems for the parts of your shop no off-the-shelf tool will ever fit.

See the products Work with me

Live products: Three
Free to start: All of them
Industries served: One
Website turnaround: 5 days

01 / The shape of the problem

Every job travels the same road

Somebody needs shirts, and somewhere between that thought and a box on a doorstep, your shop touches the job six times. Most shops lose time at the joins — the places where information gets re-typed from one tool into another.

They find you

Or they don't, and they call the shop across town instead.

Website

They ask for a price

Quantity, colors, locations, deadline, artwork — or a one-line email with none of it.

Website

You quote it

Setup, ink colors, quantity breaks, garment cost, margin. Done right, not guessed at.

Pricely

Sizes and names come in

Thirty players, thirty sizes, thirty numbers. The part that eats your week.

GroupKit

You print it

Art approval, screens, press schedule, and what's actually shippable on Friday.

Custom

It goes out the door

Packed into boxes, labeled, tracked, and the customer told without you typing an email.

Packed

No single piece of software runs that whole road. The all-in-one platforms that claim to cost more than most shops want to spend — and two-thirds of what you'd be paying for sits unused. So I build the pieces separately, and join up the ones you already have.

02 / Products

Three tools. All live. All free to start.

Each one does a single job properly instead of forty jobs adequately. Use one, use all three, or use none — they work on their own and they don't require hiring me.

Pricely

Quote smarter, win more jobs

A pricing calculator that actually knows how decorated apparel is priced. Sixteen pricing engines across screen print, embroidery, DTF, and laser — flat rate, matrix, contract, cost-plus, hourly, stitch tiers, area-based. Build profiles per customer, quote in seconds, and track every job as won or lost with the reason why.

16 pricing engines, 4 decoration methods
Win rate, revenue, and contribution margin at a glance
AI tier that quotes by chat and drafts your follow-ups

Free · Pro $4.99/mo · Pro AI $9.99/mo

pricely.ink

GroupKit

Group orders, finally under control

A coach orders thirty jerseys and every one needs a different size, name, and number. Instead of an email chain and a spreadsheet, you send one link with a passcode. Members submit their own details, pay if you want them to, and you get a production-ready summary. Or run an always-on branded storefront.

Shareable order links with passcode protection
Persistent pop-up storefronts with your branding
Stripe checkout or organizer-pays, CSV straight to production

Free · Pro · Growth

getgroupkit.com

Packed

Everything between the order and the door

Drag items into boxes, buy discounted USPS, UPS, and FedEx labels per box or all at once, print packing slips on your own template, and send a branded tracking email. Works the same whether you ship it, drive it over, or hand it across the counter.

Multi-carrier live rates and bulk label buying
Drag-and-drop packing slip and 4×6 label designer
REST API and webhooks for Shopify, Etsy, or your own system

Free · Pro $9/mo

packed.ink

03 / Work I do for you

When the product doesn't reach far enough

Products solve the problems every shop shares. The ones that are specific to how your shop runs need building. That's the other half of what I do.

Service 01 · from $500

Websites

A front door that gets found in your town, looks like the shop you actually are, and turns a stranger into a quote request you can price without a single follow-up email. Six pages, five business days, fixed price.

See what's included →

Service 02 · quoted per job

Airtable systems

The connective tissue. Quotes, jobs, art status, capacity, and reporting in one place that reflects how your shop actually works — instead of four tools and a spreadsheet nobody trusts.

How it works →

Service 03 · quoted per job

Custom apps on Replit

The thing your shop does that no software does — including mine. Internal tools, customer portals, and AI applied where it earns its place, with a straight answer about where it doesn't yet.

What I build →

04 / Why only print shops

A generalist would have to ask you what a stitch count is

There are plenty of good developers who'd take your project. Almost none of them have priced a job by ink colors and print locations, explained to a customer why their JPEG won't print, or watched a shop lose an afternoon to somebody who wanted eight shirts.

The decisions are pre-made

Minimums, decoration methods, stitch tiers, art file requirements, garment brands, the August rush. I'm not learning your business on your budget.

I use this stuff myself

I run a print shop. Every product here started as something I needed and couldn't buy at a price that made sense for a shop our size.

One industry, compounding

Everything I learn in one shop makes the next build better. That's only true if I stay pointed at one industry — so I do.

Who's behind this

Jesse Poteet

I'm a developer who ended up in the print business, or a printer who ended up writing software — depending on which day you ask.

I've spent years as an Airtable developer building operational systems — for small businesses, and on projects for teams inside large organizations where the spreadsheets were bigger but the underlying problem was identical: too many tools, none of them talking, and one person quietly holding it together.

I also run Alpine Apparel, a print shop in Castle Rock, Colorado. That's where Pricely, GroupKit, and Packed came from — every one of them started as a problem I had on a Tuesday and couldn't buy my way out of.

Operator Stack is my own shop, and it serves one industry on purpose.

05 / The rest of it

I'm not visiting this industry

Operator Stack is the software half. The other half is a press in Castle Rock, a YouTube channel, a couple of communities, and several thousand printers who ask me questions every week. That's where the product ideas come from — and it's the reason I don't have to be briefed on how a shop runs.

I print

Alpine Apparel Co Water-based screen printing in Castle Rock since 2017. Every product here started as a problem I hit on the press. Contract printing Shops send me the water-based and discharge work they'd rather not retool for.

I teach

YouTube 120+ videos on technique, DTF, pricing and running a shop. Free. Startup Screen Printing The hub — free resources, plus a $29 course on the business side of printing. Screen Printing Toolbox The equipment and software I actually use, so you skip buying the wrong thing first.

I host

The Print Crew A free Discord for people who already own a shop and want to talk real decisions. Screen Print Collective Technique-first membership with Jennifer Sanderson. Waitlist while it opens. Print for Profit Challenge Three sessions on profitability and pricing with Jonathan Overmyer.

Published & interviewed at

The Apparelist Podcast interview Interviewed on discounting and print-shop pricing, plus video segments on water-based color matching, niching, and email marketing. Ryonet · ScreenPrinting.com Guest contributor Guest articles on Ryonet's blog, including the path from graphic designer to running a water-based shop.

None of this is what you're buying here — it's just why the person building your systems already knows what a flash cure costs you in throughput.

Free · no pitch · reply within one business day

Tell me what's costing you the most time

Quoting, group orders, shipping, or the fact that nobody can find you on Google. Email me which one and I'll tell you honestly whether one of the products fixes it, whether it needs building, or whether you should leave it alone for now.

Email me — jesse@operatorstack.com Book 20 minutes