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How to price 3D prints

Most new sellers charge for filament and forget everything else. A sustainable price covers five costs and then adds profit.

The formula

1. Material

Grams from your slicer × price per gram. At $20/kg, PLA is $0.02 per gram.

2. Electricity

Typically 0.1–0.15 kWh per hour on a bed-slinger — only a few cents per hour, but it adds up on long prints.

3. Machine time

Your printer wears out: nozzles, belts, PEI sheets, eventually the whole machine. Spread its cost over its useful life (e.g. $600 over 5,000 h = $0.12/h) and add maintenance. Many sellers simply charge $0.50–$2 per print hour, which also covers the time the printer is unavailable for other jobs.

4. Labour

Slicing, removing supports, sanding, packing and messaging customers. Charge an hourly rate for real hands-on time.

5. Failures

If one print in ten fails, each good print must pay for 1.11 prints. Dividing by (1 − failure rate) does that.

Worked example

Notice filament is under 10% of the price. Machine time and labour dominate, which is why pricing by the gram alone undercharges for slow, detailed prints.

Common mistakes

• Ignoring post-processing time.
• Not charging a minimum or setup fee on tiny orders.
• Pricing below local competitors "to get started" — it's hard to raise prices later.
• Forgetting platform fees (Etsy and payment processors take 6–15%).

Tools for this