FAQ & support

No — pay-per-design checkout works as a guest with just an email address. Accounts are only needed if you buy a prepaid generation plan, since a plan balance has to be tied to somebody across visits rather than a single order.

It's the real thing. TrueView renders your design through the same embroidery engine that generates your final DST/PES files, so the stitch pattern, trim count, and dimensions you see before paying are exactly what you'll receive — not a font approximation.

Yes — typing, previewing, and watching the stitch simulation are all free. You're only charged, or a plan credit spent, once you continue past the preview to checkout.

Up to 2 lines, 40 characters each.

Straight lays your text on a flat baseline. Arched bends it around a circle — you set a radius, a start angle, and a Normal/Upside-down direction, which is the standard way badges and cap seals are digitized. For multi-line arched designs, each line becomes its own concentric ring nested inside the radius you set.

The letters would overlap themselves at that radius. Increase the radius, shorten the text, or pull in letter spacing until the design fits the circle without overlapping.

Yes — once you have 2+ lines, turn on "Different size per line" and set each line's height independently instead of one shared size for the whole design.

How often the machine cuts the thread while sewing: after every letter (cleanest, most trims), after every word, after every line, or never (fastest to sew, but leaves connecting "jump" threads between letters that usually get trimmed by hand or a laser-trim machine afterward).

Letter height sizes your design by the font's cap height — the convention professional digitizing software uses to spec size. Bounding box height instead sizes by the full design's outer edge, including any descenders or decorative flourishes, so it's a better match when you need the whole design to fit an exact space.

Yes, for 3+ line designs — turn on "Different spacing per gap" to set the distance between each individual pair of adjacent lines (line 1↔2, 2↔3, and so on) instead of one shared Line height applying to every gap equally.

Reorders the stitch sequence to start from the middle of the design and work outward, instead of left to right. This is the standard sewing order for caps and hats, since it avoids the fabric shifting in the hoop as the machine works out toward the edges.

Every font's underlying stitch data has a size range it was digitized to sew well at — too small and fine detail merges together, too large and stitches get sparse and loose. If your requested size falls outside that range, the tool tells you the exact range so you can adjust.

Appliqué digitizes letters as real fabric cutouts stitched down and edged, not a solid fill. Each letter gets three genuine stages — a placement line on its true outline (for positioning the fabric), a tack-down, and a full satin or zigzag cover — including real cutouts for closed counters like the holes in O, A, and B, not a solid-filled shortcut.

1,365 real Google Fonts, traced into true vector outlines — far more than lettering's embroidery-only catalog, since any typographic font works once it's an outline rather than pre-digitized stitch data. The preview renders your actual typed text in the real chosen font live as you type, via the same font file the engine digitizes from.

Satin is the classic solid 3-color edge — placement, tack-down, dense satin cover — for a clean, fully-covered look. Zigzag (tackle twill) is an open 2-color raw-edge finish, popular on varsity jackets, with a more textured, less solid edge.

Stable (felt/backed), Woven (cotton/twill), and Stretch (knit/jersey) each need a different amount of outward pull compensation so the finished satin doesn't come out narrower than digitized once it's actually sewn onto that material — this genuinely changes the stitch output, tuned from real industry figures for each fabric.

A raised, foam-backed satin border — the puffy 3D look popular on caps and patches — turned on with one checkbox. It reuses the same real color-change pause the design already has between tack-down and satin, so the operator just lays the foam during that existing pause instead of a separate stop, then trims the excess after the satin finishes.

Every appliqué order also includes a laser-cutter-ready SVG file, sized exactly to match the placement stitch — if you've got a laser or vinyl cutter, it cuts the fabric piece automatically instead of hand-tracing and hand-cutting it.

It's genuinely heavier work — three real stitch stages per letter (placement, tack-down, and a satin or zigzag cover) instead of one fill, plus the laser-cut file. It's priced at 2x a lettering design to reflect that, and the price doesn't change if you turn on puff.

DST and PES embroidery files — the two most widely supported machine formats — plus a production-ready PDF sheet listing your design's stats: size, stitch count, trims, thread color, and layout settings, ready to hand straight to whoever's running the machine.

Yes — the preview is generated by rendering the exact same file you download, not a separate approximation, so what you saw before paying is what you get.

One flat price per design, shown on the Plans page and again on the design page before you check out — no hidden fees, and no per-letter or per-line surcharges. An appliqué design is 2x the price of a lettering design, or 2 generations if you pay from a plan.

A plan is a one-time credit pack (50, 100, or 200 generations) you buy once and draw down over time. It requires a free account so the balance can follow you across visits — and unlike guest pay-per-design orders, every design you generate on a plan stays in your account dashboard with no download-link expiry. Plans don't renew or expire; the balance only ever goes down as you spend it.

Yes — the custom tier lets you enter any quantity and checks out immediately at the listed per-generation rate, with no manual quote step.

When a coupon is active, there's a field for it at checkout — it applies a percentage or fixed discount to your order total, up to the full price.

Whichever single payment provider is currently active for the store (Stripe, PayPal, or Paddle) — checkout only ever shows the one that's live at the time.

They're emailed to you as soon as generation finishes, and a download page is also linked right after checkout if you'd rather grab them from there directly.

3 days, for guest pay-per-design orders — the confirmation email is the durable copy, so hang onto it. If you're signed in and paid with a plan credit, that design stays available in your account dashboard indefinitely, with no expiry.

Only via the original download link or email, and only within its 3-day window. A prepaid plan is the way to get permanent, always-available access to your design history.

Reply directly to your order confirmation or delivery email with what you're seeing — it comes straight from ThreadType, and we'll help sort it out.