Less-than-minimum (LTM) fee

A less-than-minimum fee, usually shortened to LTM fee, is a flat dollar amount — often somewhere between $25 and $75 per design — that a shop tacks onto an order that falls under its posted MOQ rather than turning the job away outright. It exists because a shop's fixed costs, burning a screen, mixing a custom ink match, setup labor, don't shrink just because the order does, and the fee covers that gap.

For buyers, an LTM fee turns a small run into a real, calculable comparison: it's frequently cheaper to pay the fee and order 18 shirts than to pad the order up to a 24-piece minimum nobody actually needs. We've walked reunion and small-team customers through exactly this math more than once — six extra shirts nobody wears costs more in blanks than a flat LTM fee on the honest headcount.

When a quote includes an LTM fee, ask whether it applies per design or per order — a two-color, two-location job under minimum can rack up multiple charges that add up fast. Also ask whether a digital method like DTF sidesteps the fee entirely, since those methods rarely carry a minimum low enough to trigger it.

The mistake buyers make is treating an LTM fee as a penalty to avoid at all costs by over-ordering. Run the numbers both ways, fee plus true quantity against padded quantity at the discount tier, because the fee route is frequently the cheaper one.