Work out what a print actually costs — filament, electricity, machine time — and what you should charge for it. Free, no signup, runs entirely in your browser.
| Material cost | — |
| Electricity cost | — |
| Machine wear | — |
| Your time | — |
| Failure allowance | — |
| True cost per part | — |
| Suggested selling price | — |
Most people price a print by weighing the finished part and multiplying by the price of a kilogram of filament. That number is almost always too low, and it is the reason so many small print farms quietly lose money on every order they ship. A realistic cost model has five parts: material, electricity, machine wear, your own time, and an allowance for the prints that fail.
material cost = (grams used ÷ 1000) × price per kg electricity = (printer watts ÷ 1000) × hours × $/kWh machine wear = hours × wear rate per hour failure cost = (material + power + wear) × failure rate ÷ 100 true cost = material + power + wear + labour + failure cost selling price = true cost × (1 + margin ÷ 100)
Each of these is simple on its own. The mistake is leaving two or three of them out. Electricity in particular is routinely ignored because it feels small — but a 150 W printer running a twelve-hour job at $0.28 per kWh spends about fifty cents, and on a part that uses $2.40 of filament that is twenty percent of the material cost, not a rounding error.
Take a phone stand: 120 g of PETG, printed on a machine drawing 150 W, taking six hours.
True cost is about $9.74. Price it at $2.64 because that is what the filament cost and you are losing roughly seven dollars on every unit before you have paid for packaging or the trip to the post office. With a 60% margin the same part should sell for around $15.59.
| Material | Typical price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| PLA | $18 – $25 / kg | Cheapest and easiest. The default choice for most prints. |
| PETG | $20 – $28 / kg | Tougher and more heat resistant than PLA. Slightly slower to print. |
| ABS | $18 – $26 / kg | Needs an enclosure and good ventilation. Warping raises the failure rate. |
| TPU | $30 – $45 / kg | Flexible. Slow print speeds push up the electricity and wear cost per part. |
| Nylon | $38 – $55 / kg | Strong but hygroscopic — dry it or budget for failed prints. |
| Resin | $35 – $60 / L | Priced by volume. Add gloves, IPA and curing time. See the resin calculator. |
Power draw depends mostly on the heated bed. A small bed-and-nozzle machine idles far below a large enclosed printer, and the bed heater dominates during the first minutes of every job.
| Printer class | Typical draw while printing | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Small bedslinger (e.g. Mini-class) | 60 – 90 W | Lowest running cost; long jobs still add up over a month. |
| Standard bedslinger (e.g. Ender/MK class) | 120 – 180 W | The most common category. Around 150 W is a fair average. |
| Enclosed CoreXY | 200 – 350 W | Chamber heater and faster motion push consumption up. |
| Large format | 350 – 500 W | Big bed area dominates. Check the real figure with a plug meter. |
| MSLA resin | 30 – 80 W | Low power, but add UV curing and washing time. |
The most reliable way to get this number is a cheap plug-in power meter left on the printer for one full job. Slicers report an estimate of filament and time but almost never the energy actually consumed, and the nameplate wattage on the power supply is a maximum, not a typical draw. Our dedicated 3D printer electricity cost calculator goes deeper on this.
Your slicer tells you grams and hours. That is genuinely useful input, but it is not a cost for three reasons. It does not know what you paid for the spool. It does not know what you pay for power. And it has no concept of the print that failed at 90% and had to be run again — which is not a rare event but a normal part of the process, especially with ABS, nylon and large flat parts.
The failure allowance is the input people resist entering, because it feels like admitting something unpleasant. But a shop running at an 8% failure rate is shipping 8% more material and 8% more machine hours than it is paid for. If you do not charge for that, you are funding your customers' bad luck out of your own pocket.
Multiply the printer's draw in kilowatts by your electricity rate. A 150 W machine at $0.28/kWh costs about 4.2 cents per hour of printing. Add wear — nozzles, belts, bearings and lubricant typically work out somewhere between $0.10 and $0.50 per machine hour depending on how hard the printer is run.
For made-to-order parts, margins of 50% to 100% on true cost are normal. For stock items you expect to sell repeatedly and want to price competitively, 30% to 50% is more realistic. Below about 30% you are usually better off not taking the job, because one failed print or one return wipes out the profit on several good ones.
Yes, and it is front-loaded. The bed draws most of its power during the first few minutes while it comes up to temperature, then cycles on and off. On short prints the bed's warm-up can be a third of the total energy. This is one reason many small parts run cheaper as a single batch plate than as separate jobs.
That is what the machine wear field represents. If you prefer to be explicit, take the purchase price, subtract what you think you could sell it for in three years, and divide by the number of printing hours you expect in that period. A $500 printer with a $150 residual value over 4,000 hours is about $0.09 per hour before consumables.
Weight. Volume is useful for estimating how long a spool will last, but you buy filament by mass and the slicer reports consumption in grams, so grams are the number that converts directly into money.