3D Print Cost Calculator

A typical 25 g PLA part that prints in four and a half hours costs about $0.58 in filament — but around $12.60 once electricity, machine wear, setup and finishing time are included. Small hobby prints usually land between $1 and $15 in true cost; large or multi-day prints can run to several hundred. Material is almost never the biggest line.

Divide the spool price by the spool weight to get the filament rate — a $22 one-kilogram spool is $0.022 per gram. That is the material rate only. For a true cost per gram, divide the total job cost by the grams printed: on the default job that is roughly $0.50 per gram, more than twenty times the filament rate, because a light part can still occupy the machine and your hands for hours.

Most desktop FDM printers average 70–150 W while printing, and resin printers 40–80 W — far below their power-supply ratings, because the heaters cycle rather than run flat out. At 120 W and $0.15 per kWh that is about $0.018 an hour, or roughly 8 cents for a four-and-a-half-hour print. A heated chamber or a large bed pushes it higher; a plug-in energy meter will tell you your real figure in an afternoon.

Yes, if you print for anyone but yourself. Divide the printer price by the hours it will realistically run before you replace it — 2,000 to 10,000 for a desktop machine — and add maintenance: nozzles, belts and build plates for FDM, FEP film and LCD panels for resin. A $400 printer over 2,000 hours plus $0.05 an hour of parts works out at $0.25 an hour. Ignore it and your printer is quietly funding your customers.

Between 15% and 100% over true cost, depending on who is buying. Around 15% suits club and maker-space printing; 30% is a normal print-on-demand markup; 50% fits commercial clients who expect revisions and some warranty; 100% or more is realistic on marketplaces like Etsy, where fees, returns and listing time all come out of the same number. Markup on top of a real cost is sustainable — a guessed price is not.

Run the part through this calculator, download the PDF estimate so you have the breakdown on record, then send the customer a formal document with a validity date, the quantity, the material and what happens if the design changes. You can produce that in a couple of minutes with the free quote generator — no signup, and it exports a PDF.

Per job, usually yes. Standard resin runs about $0.03 per millilitre against $0.022 per gram for PLA, but the real difference is everything around the print: washing and curing roughly doubles the hands-on time, failure rates run higher, and IPA, gloves and FEP film are ongoing consumables FDM does not have. On this calculator’s defaults a resin job costs around $22 against $12.60 for a comparable FDM one.

Divide 1,000 grams by the grams per part, then subtract a little for supports and purge. A 25 g part gives you about 38 prints from a kilo after a 5% waste allowance; a 10 g keychain gives roughly 95; a 200 g helmet piece gives four. Long thin parts use far less than their size suggests, so always take the number from your slicer rather than eyeballing the model.

Add a percentage allowance to every job rather than trying to bill the customer whose print happened to fail. Count your scrapped prints over a month: 5% is realistic for a tuned machine running PLA, 10–15% for resin, new materials or unfamiliar geometry. The calculator applies that percentage to material, electricity, machine time and finishing, because a failure costs you all four.

Yes — it is printer-agnostic. Instead of a fixed profile you enter the three things that actually differ between machines: the printer price, its expected lifetime in print hours, and its average power draw. That covers a Bambu Lab P1S, a Prusa MK4, an Ender 3, an Elegoo Mars or Saturn, and any industrial machine you care to describe, in any of 150+ currencies.