3D Print Cost Calculator
Work out what a print costs and what to charge for it.
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About the 3D Print Cost Calculator converter
Most people costing a print work out the filament and stop there. Filament is usually the smallest part of what a print actually costs you.
This adds the pieces that get forgotten — the electricity, the wear on the machine, the prints that fail — and turns the total into a price you can quote.
The costs people leave out
Machine wear is the big one. A £400 printer with maybe 4,000 printing hours in it costs 10p an hour to run before anything else. Over a six-hour print that is 60p — often more than the plastic.
Failures are the other. If one print in ten fails, every successful print has to carry a tenth of a wasted one. The allowance is applied to the material, power and wear, but not to your time, since you only do the finishing work on the print that survived.
Charging for your own time
Print time is not your time. The machine runs unattended; what costs you is the setup, the support removal, the sanding and the packing.
That is why time is entered as finishing minutes at an hourly rate, rather than being derived from the print duration. A twelve-hour print that comes off the bed clean can be worth less of your time than a two-hour one covered in supports.
Markup is not profit
The suggested price applies your markup to the full unit cost, so the profit shown is what is left after everything above has been paid for.
If you are selling, remember that marketplace fees, postage and packaging come out of that figure too, and none of them are included here.
Frequently asked questions
What wattage should I use?
A common bed-slinger draws roughly 100–150 W averaged over a print, more while the bed heats and less afterwards. An enclosed printer with a big heated bed can average 200 W or more. A plug-in energy monitor is the only way to know your own.
How long does a printer last?
It depends far more on maintenance than on the badge. A few thousand hours is a reasonable planning figure for a hobby machine, and it is a number to revisit rather than trust — the point is that the cost is not zero.
What currency is this in?
Whichever one you type your costs in. Nothing is converted, so as long as the spool price, electricity rate and printer price are all in the same currency, the answer is too.
Is my job saved?
No. Copy the job as JSON to keep it, and paste it back into the box on this page to reproduce the estimate. There is no account and nothing stored on a server.