Costing tools for people who print things and sell them

Filament Cost Calculator is a small set of free calculators for FDM printing: what a print costs in material, what the machine hours and electricity add, and what price makes sense once failures and fees are included.

Last updated 12 October 2026 Formulas and sources shown on the page No signup · nothing you type is uploaded Report an error

A cluttered home workbench with a computer monitor, soldering iron, multimeter and hand tools — **A hobby workbench mid-project** A bench, a kitchen scale and a spreadsheet are the only inputs these calculators need. There is no market data behind them and no industry averages — every figure comes from a receipt you type in yourself. Photo: James Bastow, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Why this site exists

Most 3D printing cost advice online is a single paragraph and a guess. "Charge about three times the filament cost" is not a pricing method — it ignores machine time, power, failure rate and the platform fees that take a cut of every sale. Meanwhile the communities are full of people who priced a print from the sticker price of the spool and slowly realised they were working for nothing.

These calculators take the opposite approach. You enter real numbers from your own receipts, slicer and electricity tariff. Every formula is written out on the page so you can check it. Every default is labelled as an assumption rather than a market figure.

How the numbers are produced

All arithmetic runs in your browser. Nothing you type is uploaded, stored or sent to a server.
Each calculator shows the formula it uses, in plain text, on the same page.
Default values are examples chosen to be plausible, not averages we claim to have measured.
Where a figure depends on a supplier, platform or utility, we say so and point you at the source instead of inventing a number.

What we are not

This is not a quote, an accounting system or financial advice. It is a calculator. If a result looks wrong, the input is almost always wrong — start there. If you think a formula on this site is broken, tell us and we will fix it.

How the site is paid for

The calculators are free and always will be. Running costs are covered by display advertising and by affiliate links to products we write about, such as filament, printers and accessories. If you buy through one of those links the price you pay does not change and we may receive a small commission. Recommendations are based on documented specifications and published user reports, not on which retailer pays best.

Read the full detail on our privacy page and terms.

Corrections

Found an arithmetic error, a broken link or an out-of-date claim? Use the contact page. Corrections take priority over new content.

A wooden hobby workbench with drawers, hand tools and a lamp clamped to the front — A bench is where the estimate meets the actual receipt. Weigh the offcuts, count the failed parts, then go back and change the assumptions.

Small parts drawers filled with screws, bolts and printed components — Consumables — nozzles, screws, heat inserts, glue — are the line item most people leave out of a per-part cost. They do not disappear just because they are small.

Photo credits Every photograph on this site is a freely licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, credited in place. In order of appearance: workshop row — Smuconlaw (CC BY-SA 4.0); spool on scales and filament scale — Creative Tools (CC BY 2.0); filament shelf — westonhighschool library (CC BY-SA 4.0); printing part — Maurizio Pesce (CC BY 2.0); workbench and parts drawers — Thomas Farley (CC0) and Windell Oskay (CC BY 2.0); hobby bench — James Bastow (CC BY-SA 4.0); digital calipers — Simon A. Eugster (CC BY-SA 4.0); filament spool — Tatár Lehel (CC BY-SA 4.0); printer with orange part — Creative Tools (CC BY 2.0).