3D printing cost calculator

What actually goes into the cost of a printed part

Four things are paid for before a part is handed over: the filament in it, the electricity the printer drew while making it, the share of the machine's price used up by those hours, and the minutes a person spent starting, removing, finishing and packing it. The first is obvious and the smallest surprise; the last is usually the largest and the one most often left out of a quote.

Two more decide whether the quote is profitable, and both are about the shop rather than the part: how often prints fail, and what margin the price is meant to carry. Those are the two the calculator above puts on the same screen as the rest, because they are the two that move a number the most.

• Filament: grams in the part, at what a kilogram costs from your supplier.
• Electricity: print hours, at the printer's average draw and your rate per kWh.
• Machine: what it cost, divided by the hours you expect it to run before replacement.
• Labour: paid minutes per part, at what an hour of that person costs.

Failed prints are a yield, not a surcharge

This is the line most calculators skip, and the one that quietly turns a profitable order into a break-even one. A shop that scraps one print in five is not spending 20% more — it is spending 25% more, because to hand over 100 good parts it has to produce 125.

The arithmetic: cost divided by the good fraction, not cost multiplied by the failure rate. At 20% scrap that is a difference of five percentage points on every quote, and it grows as the failure rate does — worst exactly when a shop can least afford to under-quote.

Which is also why the number is worth measuring rather than guessing. A rate typed from memory is usually optimistic; the one your queue actually records is the one to put in this field.

Margin is taken on the price, not added to the cost

A 40% margin on $60 of cost is a price of $100, not $84. Multiplying cost by 1.4 is a 40% markup, which is a 28.6% margin — a shop quoting that way believes it is keeping four dollars in ten while keeping under three.

The calculator divides by the remaining fraction, so the margin you type is the margin you keep. If you prefer to think in markup, the two are printed side by side in the result.

Pricing an order rather than a part

A hobby print is one part. A job is forty brackets in PETG, two hundred clips in PLA and a handful of nylon bushings, and the mix is what makes it worth quoting carefully: the nylon line can cost more than everything else together while being the smallest count on the sheet.

Each line here carries its own material, its own spool price, its own print time and its own count. The overheads are shared, because they are properties of the shop, not of the part. The result shows each line on its own so a loss-making item is visible before the quote goes out, not after.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a 3D printed part cost?

For a typical 85 g PLA part printed in three and a half hours, filament is around $1.70, electricity a few cents, machine depreciation about $0.20, and ten minutes of labour at $25 an hour about $4.15 — labour is usually the largest single line. Add your failure rate and the margin you intend to keep and the calculator above gives the figure for your own numbers.

What should I charge for a 3D print?

Take the full cost — including failed prints and paid labour — and divide by one minus your target margin. Charging a fixed multiple of filament cost is the most common way shops end up working for nothing: filament is often under a fifth of what a part really costs.

How do I calculate the electricity a print uses?

Multiply print hours by the printer's average draw in kilowatts and by your rate per kWh. A mid-size FDM printer averages roughly 120 W while printing — nothing like its heat-up peak — so electricity is usually cents per part, and it matters mainly on very long prints or where power is expensive.

Should I include the printer's own price in the cost?

Yes, as depreciation: the machine's price divided by the hours you expect it to run before it is replaced or rebuilt. A $500 printer expected to last 8,000 hours costs about six cents an hour to own, which is small per part and decisive across a farm's monthly output.

What failure rate should I assume?

Use your own, measured over a month of real jobs rather than remembered. Shops that have never counted usually guess low. If you have nothing to go on, start at 5–10% for well-tuned single-material work and revise it as soon as you have data.