I keep a spreadsheet of all the quilts I've made. For most of them I have the measurements. In order to figure out how much longarm services might have cost me, I added a field for the square inches and multiplied by .02, figuring that some of my quilts would have been custom quilted at a much higher price and most would have been quilted less expensively. I came up with over $4500, and I've only been quilting for about 6 years. I did a rough calculation like this when I bought my longarm, 2+ years ago. The calculations weren't enough to convince me that buying the longarm would save me money, but I am one of those quilters who wants every bit of the quilt to be done by myself. I quilted everything on my DSM before I bought the longarm, and I was getting tired of doing that. If I wanted to really save money, I would just quit quilting!