3D Printing Cost Calculator

What goes into the cost of a 3D print?

A defensible price is the sum of distinct, itemisable layers — material, energy, machine ownership, labour, a failure reserve, overhead, fees and tax. What this calculator adds on top of the full cost stack is proof you can defend line by line: every layer’s arithmetic is expanded with your own numbers substituted in (“0.050 kg × $26.32/kg → $1.32”), the failure reserve is an expected-value model — repeatable cost × p ÷ (1 − p) — where you choose which layers are wasted on a failed print, the sell price is solved backwards through marketplace percentage and fixed fees, and the quantity-tier table shows the margin you actually achieve at each batch size. It is also honest about what G-code can tell you that an STL cannot.

• Material. Filament is costed by weight at your price per kilogram, with an allowance for spool waste. Resin is costed by volume at your price per litre, with IPA, gloves and FEP wear added as separate consumables.
• Energy. Average watts × print hours × your electricity rate, with the kilowatt-hour figure shown so you can check it against a meter.
• Machine ownership. Depreciation per hour — (purchase + lifetime maintenance − residual) ÷ useful print hours — so the printer pays for itself over its life.
• Labour. Setup, post-processing and packing at your hourly rate, with one-time setup kept separate from per-unit work so batch pricing stays honest.
• Failure reserve. An expected-value uplift — repeatable cost × p ÷ (1 − p) — reflecting the prints that genuinely fail. You choose which layers are wasted on a failed attempt.
• Overhead. Either an hourly allocation of rent, software and tools, or explicit per-job lines — labelled, never combined invisibly.

How the price is solved

With a target margin, the price is solved backwards so that after the platform takes its percentage and fixed fee, your payout still covers cost at that margin:

price = (cost + fixed_fee) / (1 − percentage_fee − margin)

Margin and markup are not the same operation. Margin is profit as a share of price; markup is profit as a share of cost. The calculator lets you pick either and labels the result, and the pricing guide walks through both with worked numbers.

Why do failure reserve and overhead belong in a quote?

Because failed prints and rent are real costs whether or not you write them down. A seller who prices only the successful print pays for every failure out of the margin they thought they had. The failure reserve here is an expected value, not a guess: if a share p of attempts fail, each good print costs 1 ÷ (1 − p) attempts, so the reserve is the repeatable cost × p ÷ (1 − p). At an 8% failure rate and $6 of repeatable cost, that is $0.52 per print — small per job, and roughly one full failed print every twelve jobs if you ignore it. You choose which layers repeat on a failure: material, energy and machine time usually do; packing does not.

Overhead is the same argument for rent, software, insurance and tools. This calculator offers two honest ways to carry it: an hourly allocation (monthly overhead ÷ billable hours, charged per print hour) or explicit per-order and per-unit lines. Both appear as their own labelled row in the breakdown — never folded invisibly into another figure, because a cost you cannot point at is a cost you cannot defend.

Markup vs margin — what is the actual difference?

Margin divides profit by the selling price; markup divides it by the cost. They diverge fast, and quoting “30%” without saying which is how batches go out under-priced:

At 50%, the two readings of the same sentence are $5 apart on a $10 cost. The calculator supports both operations, labels which one is driving the price, and reports both figures on the result so you can quote in one and sanity-check in the other.

What does a slicer estimate actually tell you?

G-code is the truthful source: the slicer writes its own time and filament estimates into the file headers, and this tool reads those lines, shows them as evidence, and attributes the slicer that produced them. One caveat matters — Cura reports filament length, not weight, so grams are derived from that length using the density of the material you select. That is not pedantry: converting 329.575 mm of filament with PLA’s density (1.24 g/cm³) instead of ABS’s (1.04) overstates the material by 19.2%, and the error prices every quote from that file.

An STL, by contrast, contains geometry and nothing else — volume and a bounding box. Print time, layer count and support usage depend on slicer settings the file does not carry, and any tool that derives a time from an STL is guessing. Even a slicer estimate is an estimate: real prints drift with firmware acceleration limits, bed levelling and the occasional failure. The time calculator reads the slicer’s figure rather than inventing one — see the print time calculator for the details.

Related calculators

Every figure here is a transparent estimate based on the inputs you provide. It is not a guarantee of print success, dimensional accuracy, strength or delivery time. The maths, its sources and its limitations are documented in the methodology.