3D printing cost guides
Each guide explains one assumption the calculators rely on, in the order most people need it: what material costs, what else a print costs, and which slicer settings move the total.
Cost fundamentals
Start here if you are costing prints for the first time.
Settings and materials
Why the same model costs different amounts on different profiles.
Infill: strength versus cost
Why 20% to 50% rarely doubles strength but reliably raises material use and print time.
GuidePLA vs PETG, by cost
Price per kilo, waste rate, drying and failure behaviour compared on a per-part basis.
GuideWhy failed prints belong in the price
A 10% failure rate is 10% of your filament and 10% of your machine hours. Both are real money.
GuideWhich PLA is worth buying
Diameter tolerance, fill accuracy and winding — the things you can measure yourself in ten minutes.
GuideGuides link to the calculator they support, so you can check the arithmetic with your own numbers as you read.
How to read these guides
Every calculator on this site makes a simplification. The guides are where those simplifications get explained — read them in order if you are costing prints for the first time, or dip into one when a number on a calculator looks wrong.
The five lines that decide what a print costs
Almost every costing argument comes down to the same five lines. Four of them are easy to get right once you know where the number should come from, and the fifth is the one people quietly set to zero.
| Line | What it covers | Where your number comes from | What people get wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Material | Filament actually consumed, waste included | Slicer estimate × (1 + waste %) | Dividing by the gross shipping weight of the box |
| Machine time | Hours the printer is occupied and cannot do anything else | Slicer time estimate, in hours | Treating the printer as free because it is already paid for |
| Power | Kilowatt-hours × your electricity tariff | Printer draw (kW) × hours × tariff | Assuming 100 W for an enclosed or heated-chamber machine |
| Failures | Spools and machine hours lost to prints that did not work | Your own failure rate over the last month | Setting it to zero because the last print worked |
| Labour & fees | Packing, post-processing, platform and payment cuts | Your hourly rate and the published fee schedule | Forgetting the processor fee is charged on top of the platform fee |
The input that is usually wrong
Waste is the line where estimates and reality disagree most often. A well-tuned printer on a familiar material loses somewhere between 8% and 15% of what the slicer says the model needs — purge lines, a brim, supports, the tail left on a spool that the extruder cannot reach, and the occasional restart. While you are still dialling in a new filament that figure is easily double.
Slicer estimates describe the part. The spool describes everything that got spent getting you the part. If both numbers exist and they disagree, the spool is right.
What these guides do not cover
They do not cover design time, sales tax, outbound shipping, packaging cost or marketing. Those belong in a pricing decision, not in a per-part cost, and mixing them together is how a price ends up looking defensible while the job still loses money. They also do not give you market rates: filament prices vary by country, shipping and season, and no figure on this site is a quoted price.
Where a number genuinely depends on an outside source — a supplier, a utility tariff, a marketplace fee schedule — the page says so and tells you to check the source rather than printing a figure we cannot verify.