3D print cost spreadsheet: formula and limits

Most print shops price in a spreadsheet before they price in anything else, and for good reason: it is free, it is yours, and the slicer already hands you the two numbers that matter, grams and hours. What follows is a complete cost sheet you can copy, line for line the same as the cost engine behind this site’s calculators and the Printyard app, then an honest look at where a sheet stops working.

The inputs

Put the labels in column A and your numbers in column B. Leave a cell at zero when a line does not apply: the dryer on a job that never saw one, the resin rows on a filament print.

Use the draw measured on the material you are printing, not the power supply’s rating. A chamber printing ABS draws more than the same machine on PLA, and the printer pages list each maker’s own measurements by material.

The formulas

Paste these into column D, beside a label in column C.

Three choices in there are deliberate. Purge is its own line at the same price per gram, because waste you can see is waste you start charging for. Machine wear has two parts, the printer’s price spread over its life and the year’s upkeep spread over the hours it runs, so a machine that sits idle costs more per hour than one that never stops.

And the failure reserve covers the material, the power, the wear and the consumables but not labour, drying, parts or packaging. A print that fails at hour nineteen burned the plastic and the machine time; nobody sanded it, nothing was fitted to it, and it was never boxed. With more than one filament in a job, price the purge at the job’s average cost per gram.

A worked example

A wholesale desk organiser in PETG: 210 g in the model, 20 g of purge, a $26.50 spool, 9 hours on a printer that draws 120 W and cost $699. The printer is assumed to last 6,000 print hours, cost $180 a year in upkeep and run 4,200 hours a year, with 25 minutes of hands at $28 an hour, a 6% failure rate and a 60% markup. Those are inputs, not measurements; change them to yours.

Electricity is priced at $0.1816 per kWh, the US average residential price for August 2026.EIA

Three times the filament would have charged $16.70 for the same job. The landed cost is $20.70, so the rule of thumb sells it for $4.01 under cost, before any marketplace takes its cut. Every figure above is computed by Printyard’s cost engine, not typed in.

Where a spreadsheet is the better choice

• It is free, and the file is yours. Nobody can change the price or close the account.
• You can add any line you like: a design fee, a rush charge, a material nobody else stocks.
• If you price a handful of jobs a month at a desk, it is all you need.

Where it stops keeping up

The formula is the easy part. The sheet fails on everything around it: somebody has to type every print and every spool change, at a laptop, after the fact. A four-printer seller described it this way: “Most of my business is run through excel spreadsheets tracking prints, profits, shipping costs, etc. At this point the administrative work is becoming pretty intense and is taking 2+ hours a day before or after work”.r/3Dprintingbusiness

So the sheet drifts from the shelf. “In an ideal world I would update it every time I open a spool, but in reality I do a pass to make sure it is up to date every couple of weeks.”r/BambuLab

And it lives on the wrong device. The printer is in the garage and the phone is in your hand: “google sheets bit the problem here is that it is super mobile unfriendly.”r/3Dprinting

None of the cells above knows what is left on a roll, which customer an order belongs to, or what the month kept once fees and failed prints came out. Each of those is another tab, and each tab is another thing to keep in step by hand.

What Printyard does with the same formula

Printyard is these cells with the typing taken out. The printer, the roll, the tariff and your rates are entered once; a quote is grams and hours on two steppers at the machine, and the breakdown above appears as you set them. Logging the print takes its grams off the roll in three taps, orders are built from saved quotes, and the month shows gross and net with the gap itemised. It works on an iPhone with no signal and in a browser at the desk.

What you give up: the sheet is free and Printyard is not. On the web it is $9.99 a month, $69.99 a year or $149.99 once, shown in US dollars before checkout converts them.Printyard pricing

You also give up the file. There is no export, and no formula of your own beyond the lines the quote already has. If that matters more than the typing, keep the sheet.

To try the arithmetic without either, the 3D print cost calculator runs it in the browser. The reasoning behind each line is in how to price 3D prints, and the phone apps that also replace a sheet are in the cost calculator apps compared.