3D Print Cost Calculator

What does a 3D print really cost — and what should you charge for it? Enter your filament, print time, and printer details. You'll get the true cost per print (material + electricity + printer wear, adjusted for your failure rate), cost per gram, and an honest starting point for pricing prints you sell. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

Material

Filament type (sets a typical price)

Filament price ($ per kg)

Print weight (grams, from your slicer)

Preset prices are editable ballpark estimates for a 1 kg spool — enter what you actually pay. Include supports and purge in the weight if your slicer reports them.

Electricity

Printer class (sets a typical wattage)

Average power draw while printing (watts)

Print time (hours, from your slicer)

Electricity rate ($ per kWh)

Wattage presets are editable estimates of average draw while printing — heat-up peaks are higher, steady-state is lower. A plug-in power meter gives the real number.

Printer wear (depreciation)

Printer price ($ — 0 to skip wear)

Expected lifetime (print hours)

Spreads the printer's cost over its working life: price ÷ lifetime hours × this print's hours. 5,000 hours is a common planning assumption for consumer machines — edit it to match your experience.

Failure rate

Prints that fail (%)

Failed prints still burn filament and electricity. At a failure rate r, each success costs on average 1÷(1−r) attempts, so material and electricity are multiplied accordingly. 10% is typical for everyday printing; well-dialed machines run lower.

True cost of this print

Material—

Electricity—

Printer wear—

Failed-print overhead—

—

What to charge (if you sell prints)

Markup on cost: 3×

Your time (minutes — optional, 0 for none)

Your rate ($ per hour)

Shipping, packaging, post-processing consumables ($ — optional)

—

Honest note: this is a floor, not a formula. Markup-on-cost tells you the least you can charge without losing money — what people will actually pay is set by the market, your print quality, and demand for the design. Check what comparable prints sell for before quoting.

Assumptions & FAQ

Why does failure rate matter so much?

A failed print is pure waste: the filament and electricity are spent with nothing to sell or use. At a 10% failure rate, every successful print effectively costs 1÷0.9 ≈ 1.11 prints' worth of material and power — about 11% more than the naive number. Sellers who ignore this quietly lose margin on every batch. The multiplier here is applied to material and electricity only; failed attempts do add some printer hours too, but failures usually die early in the print, so charging full wear for them would overstate it. If your failures typically run long before dying, nudge your failure rate up or your lifetime hours down to compensate.

Why is the failure rate capped at 90%?

At 100% every print fails, so no finite price covers a success — the multiplier goes to infinity. Anything above 90% is capped there for the math and clearly flagged in the result. If you're genuinely failing that often, the fix is tuning, not pricing.

Where does the 5,000-hour lifetime come from?

It's a planning assumption, not a measurement: consumer printers commonly deliver a few thousand print hours before repairs stop being worth it, and 5,000 is a round, middle-of-the-road figure. It's fully editable — a workhorse you maintain well might do far more, a cheap machine less. The wear line is your printer's price spread over that life, so doubling lifetime halves per-print wear.

What does this calculator leave out?

Design and modeling time, slicing and setup effort, maintenance parts (nozzles, build surfaces, belts) beyond the flat depreciation line, rent and insurance if you run a real shop, and platform or payment fees if you sell online. Post-processing materials (sanding, paint, glue) and packaging have no dedicated line — fold them into the shipping/consumables field. Your hands-on time goes in the labor field.

Is this business or tax advice?

No. It's arithmetic. Selling prints regularly can create tax, insurance, and consumer-law obligations that vary by where you live — this page doesn't touch any of that. Whether you're a hobbyist recovering costs or building a side business, treat the output as a cost estimate, not advice.

Are the preset prices and wattages real-time data?

No. The spool prices and printer wattages are editable ballpark estimates, not live prices — filament varies by brand and region, and power draw varies by machine and material. Enter your own numbers; the result is only as good as your inputs.

Do you earn commission on filament or printers?

No. This page currently has no affiliate relationships and doesn't recommend or link to any specific product — it just does the arithmetic.

Do my numbers get uploaded?

No. The page is fully client-side; everything is calculated in your browser.