Working Out What a Print Really Costs
Material is only one line. A print's real cost also includes energy, your time, consumables, wear on the machine, an allowance for failed prints, and finishing and packaging. Take weights, volumes and times from your slicer, measure your own power draw and failure rate, and add every line before you think about price.
Every number in this lesson that is not a formula is an example, made up to show the arithmetic. Your costs come from your own receipts, your slicer and your own measurements. The Calculators page has filament cost, print cost and resin cost calculators that do the arithmetic for you.
Variable and fixed costs
The U.S. Small Business Administration separates costs into fixed costs, which stay the same over a period whatever you produce (rent, insurance, salaries), and variable costs, which go up with each unit you make. Some costs are a mix, and the SBA suggests splitting those into their fixed and variable parts. For printing, material and energy are clearly variable; the printer itself is a one-time cost you recover over its working life; your workspace is fixed.
The lines in a print's cost
| Line | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|
| Material | Slicer's filament weight, or resin volume including supports, and what you paid Measure it |
| Energy | Print time from the slicer, power draw measured with a plug-in meter, and your electricity rate Measure it |
| Labor | Your time to prepare, slice, remove, clean, finish and pack Measure it |
| Consumables | Nozzles, build surfaces, glue; for resin, gloves, wash liquid, vat films, paper towels |
| Machine wear | The printer's cost spread over the hours you expect it to run |
| Failures | Your own failure rate, from a log of every print Measure it |
| Finishing and packaging | Primer, paint, glue, inserts, bags, boxes, labels |
Material
Use the slicer's weight after slicing, which includes supports, brim and purge. Example: a 1,000 g spool that cost 20.00 is 0.02 per gram, so a 75 g print is 1.50 of filament.
Use the slicer's volume with supports. Example: a 1,000 mL bottle that cost 30.00 is 0.03 per mL, so a 40 mL print is 1.20 of resin.
Count the material you throw away. FDM purge towers, brims and supports are in the slicer's weight; the resin left on supports and wiped off parts is not, and neither is the wash liquid.
Energy
Example: a printer measured at 120 W average for a 3 hour print uses 0.36 kWh; at 0.15 per kWh that is about 0.05.
Do not use the number on the power supply label: that is a maximum, not the average while printing. Put a plug-in energy meter on the printer for a whole typical print and divide the kWh it reports by the hours Measure it. Draw depends on bed and nozzle temperatures, so measure with the material you usually print. Resin printers need the curing station and any heated wash counted too.
Labor
Time at the printer is an easy line to leave out. Time yourself on a few jobs: slicing and setup, plate removal, support removal, washing and curing for resin, sanding and painting, packing. Multiply by an hourly rate you choose. Leaving labor at zero does not make it free; it means the price pays you nothing.
Machine wear and consumables
The expected hours are your own estimate, so treat the result as an estimate. Example: a printer that cost 600.00, with 150.00 set aside for repairs, spread over 3,000 printing hours is 0.25 per hour.
Treat nozzles, build sheets, vat films and similar parts the same way: what they cost divided by how many prints or hours they last for you.
The Print cost calculator has no separate line for machine wear or consumables. Add both into its Finishing and packaging field, so they are part of the base cost and the failure allowance applies to them too.
Failures
Failed prints cost material, energy and machine time, and they are part of the cost of the prints that succeed. Keep a log of every print and whether it worked; after a few dozen jobs you have a real failure rate Measure it. Long, fine prints fail more often: Formlabs points out that more layers mean more chances for something to go wrong. The print cost calculator adds a failure allowance as a percentage on top of the base cost:
Base cost is material, energy, labor and the finishing field (which should include machine wear and consumables). Example: a base cost of 7.50 with a 10 percent allowance is 8.25.
A worked example
All figures below are made up for illustration Measure it.
| Line | Example | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Filament | 75 g at 0.02 per g | 1.50 |
| Energy | 0.36 kWh at 0.15 | 0.05 |
| Labor | 15 min at 20.00 per h | 5.00 |
| Finishing field | Bag and box 0.80, plus machine wear 3 h at 0.25 per h = 0.75 | 1.55 |
| Base cost | 8.10 | |
| Failure allowance | 10 percent | 0.81 |
| Total cost | 8.91 |
In this example the filament is less than a fifth of the total, and labor is over half. Once labor is counted honestly it can outweigh the material, which is why pricing by material weight alone can undercharge. Once you know the total, Pricing Custom Prints turns it into a price. To lower cost per part, Batch Production covers filling plates and cutting setup time.
- Calculate your startup costs U.S. Small Business Administration
- What Does Resolution Mean in 3D Printing? Formlabs
Last reviewed 2026-11-05