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3D print cost calculator

Type the grams and hours from your slicer. The calculator adds the costs the slicer leaves out, suggests a price at your markup, and shows what is left after the marketplace takes its cut.

Filament$1.80
Purge and supports$0.15
Electricity$0.10
Machine wear and upkeep$0.56
Your time$11.67
Consumables$0.80
Failed-print reserve$0.20
Parts and packaging$0.00
What it costs you$15.28
Price at 60% markup$24.45
Etsy takes$2.77
You keep$6.40
Three times the filament would charge $5.40 and keep -$10.85 after Etsy’s cut and the costs above.

Machine wear assumes 6,000 hours of life and $180 a year of upkeep over 4,200 hours run. Consumables are $0.80 a job. Etsy’s fee is a starting estimate and is charged on the whole order, shipping included.

How it is worked out

The filament and the purge are charged at the spool’s price per gram. Electricity is the printer’s average draw while printing, times the hours, times your tariff. Machine wear is the printer’s price spread over its working life plus a year’s upkeep spread over the hours it runs, so a machine that sits idle costs more per hour than one that never stops.

Your time is setup and finishing at your hourly rate. The failed-print reserve is your failure rate applied to the plastic, the power, the wear and the consumables, and to nothing else: a print that fails was never finished or packed. Parts and packaging go on top, then the markup, then the channel’s fee comes off the price.

It is the arithmetic the Printyard app quotes with, line for line. The one difference is the power: the app scales one draw by the material, and this page uses the draw each maker measured for that material.

Printers, by the maker's own figures

Materials, by the makers' datasheets

Questions

How do you calculate the cost of a 3D print?

Charge the filament and the purge at the roll's price per gram, the electricity the printer draws for the print's hours, the machine's wear and upkeep for those hours, your setup and finishing time, and the consumables, parts and packaging. Then add a reserve for failed prints on the costs a failure burns: the plastic, the power, the wear and the consumables.

How much should I charge for a 3D print?

Start from the landed cost, not from the filament. Put your markup on top, then check what is left after the marketplace's fee, which is charged on the whole order, shipping included. Three times the filament lands near a fair price on a short PLA print and misses on long, hot or hand-finished ones, where power, machine hours and labour outweigh the plastic.

Why does the failure reserve leave out labour?

A print that fails late has burned its plastic, its power and its machine hours, but nobody sanded, painted or packed it. Putting labour in the reserve would charge every customer for finishing work that failed prints never got.

What failure rate should I use?

Your own. Count failed prints against all prints for a month, or weigh the failure bin against the grams you shipped. Long and multi-day prints fail more often than small ones, so a shop that sells both can set the rate per job.

Why does the power change with the material?

Hotter plastics need a hotter bed, and on an enclosed machine a warm chamber. Where the printer's maker publishes a measured draw for the material, the calculator uses it. Where it does not, the calculator uses the PLA figure and says so.

Where do the starting numbers come from?

The electricity price is the US residential average the EIA reports for August 2026, 18.16 cents per kWh. Printer draws are each maker's own measurement and spool prices are each maker's list price. Labour, markup, machine life and upkeep are the same starting assumptions as the Printyard app's demo, so change them to your shop's.EIA

Read next

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Keep these numbers for every print

Printyard runs this arithmetic on your phone at the machine and on the web: every quote itemised, every roll to the gram, and a month with the fees and the failed prints already taken out.

Price your shopDownload on the App Store

Sources