3D printing cost calculator

What a print actually costs

Most people count the plastic and stop. The plastic is real, but on a typical home print it is often less than half of the cost, and on a long print it can be much less.

**Filament** is the grams the print uses times the price per kilogram you paid. **Electricity** is the printer’s average power times the print time times your price per kilowatt-hour. **Printer wear** is the price of the printer spread over the hours it prints before it needs rebuilding — nozzles, belts, bed sheets and fans all wear out, and a busy printer pays for itself in parts as well as plastic.

**Failed prints** are the cost that makes the others honest. If one print in ten fails, you pay for eleven attempts to get ten good parts. The calculator adds exactly that share. **Your time** is off by default, because for a hobby print it is not a cost; set an hourly rate if you are pricing work for somebody else.

Where the numbers come from

Drop in a **G-code file** and the filament comes straight from the moves in it, and the time comes from the slicer’s own estimate where the file has one. Those are the best numbers you can get without printing it.

Drop in a **model** — STL, 3MF, OBJ, STEP and the rest — and its volume and surface area are measured, then turned into plastic the way a slicer would use it: a solid skin the thickness of the walls, and the infill percentage of everything inside. That estimate is usually within about fifteen per cent of what a slicer reports. Set the infill and walls to match your slicer for a closer figure.

A model with holes in it has no volume that can be measured. If that happens, one button closes the holes — the same repair the STL repair tool runs — and the estimate appears.

Every estimate can be typed over. If your slicer says 43 grams and 2 hours 10 minutes, put those in and the rest of the calculation uses them.

Print it yourself, or order it?

For a part in PLA or PETG that fits your printer, printing it yourself is almost always far cheaper. A print service has to charge for handling, set-up and shipping on top of the material, and those are fixed costs that swamp the price of a small part.

Ordering starts to win in four situations, and the verdict under the numbers checks your part against each of them. The part is bigger than your printer’s bed. The material needs a hot, enclosed chamber — ABS, ASA, nylon, polycarbonate — and your printer does not have one. You need many copies by a date, and the hours add up to more than your printer can deliver. Or you need a finish a filament printer cannot give: resin for fine detail, or powder-bed nylon for a strong part with no layer lines.

And if you do not own a printer, the question answers itself. Switch off "I have a printer" and the calculator shows what the material alone is worth, which is a useful thing to know when you compare quotes.

3D printing cost per gram

The plastic alone is the price of the roll divided by its weight: a 1 kg roll at 20 is 2 cents a gram, at 30 it is 3. That is the number most people quote, and it is the floor rather than the cost.

The number under the total above is the full cost per gram of finished part: material, power, wear and failed prints, divided by the grams of the part. On an ordinary PLA print it lands at roughly one and a half to three times the plastic alone — nearer the top for a long, light print, where the hours cost more than the grams. It is the right number to hold against a print service, because their quote is a full cost too.

Pricing a print for somebody else: making a quote

Set your time to an hourly rate — the minutes you spend slicing, removing supports and packing, not the hours the printer runs on its own — and the markup to what you want on top. The quote appears under the cost, per copy and in total, with the margin shown separately so you can see what you are actually keeping.

Common practice among people selling prints is a markup of 50 to 200 per cent on the full cost, more for one-off parts and less for runs of many identical ones, and the failure rate set honestly: a quote that assumes every print works is a quote that loses money on the one that does not. Shipping and packaging go on top and are not included here.

Resin print costs

Choose Resin in the material list. Resin is sold by the litre and a litre weighs about 1.1 kg, so a 30 bottle is about 27 a kilogram — type that as the price. A resin print is solid unless it has been hollowed, so the estimate from a model is its full volume; supports usually add 10 to 30 per cent on top.

The costs particular to resin are not in the plastic. Isopropyl alcohol for washing, gloves, the release film in the vat, which wears out every few litres, and the screen, which is a consumable on most printers. Put them under printer wear: a 300 printer whose screen and film cost 60 every 2,000 hours adds 3 cents an hour.

Resin print time depends on how tall the part stands, not how big it is — every layer takes the same few seconds whether it is a ring or a full plate. That is why the calculator leaves the time to you rather than guessing it. Take the figure from your slicer.

Metal and industrial printing

Metal printing — laser powder-bed fusion, binder jetting — is not something a desktop calculator can price, because the cost is mostly machine time on equipment that costs hundreds of thousands, plus post-processing. Expect a small metal part to be priced in tens or hundreds rather than cents.

The fastest honest answer is a quote. The services listed under the verdict above quote metal and CNC from the same file you dropped here; use this calculator for the plastic version first, so you know what the metal one is costing you over it.

The costs people forget

Drying filament. Nylon, PETG and TPU absorb water from the air and print badly until they are dried, which is several hours of a dryer or an oven. On a long print in a humid room, count it.

Supports and waste. The weight a slicer reports includes supports, a brim and a purge line, all of which go in the bin. A model estimate here does not include supports, so add a few grams for a part that needs them.

Finishing. Removing supports, sanding and painting are often more time than the print itself. That is what the hands-on minutes are for.