The True Cost of 3D Printing: What Your Quote Is Missing
Filament price is the tip of the iceberg. Electricity, machine depreciation, labour, and failure rate all eat into your margin — and most sellers ignore at least two of them.
Most 3D print sellers undercharge. Not by a little — sometimes by 40–50 % once you add up everything their quote left out. Here is what a complete cost model actually includes.
Filament: the easy part
Filament cost is the one number everyone knows. Weigh your spool before and after, multiply by your cost-per-gram, done. The mistake is stopping here.
Even at this stage, build in a waste factor. Purge lines at the start of a run, support structures you bin afterwards, the occasional string or blob that goes in the bin — these typically add 5–10 % to your raw filament figure. PLA is forgiving; multi-material or exotic filaments can waste more.
Electricity: small per print, large at scale
A desktop FDM printer draws 80–300 W depending on the machine and whether the enclosure heater is running. Multiply by print hours and your local kWh rate and you get a cost that is easy to ignore for a single print and impossible to ignore for a print farm running 24/7.
In the UK at 24 p/kWh, a Bambu X1C (150 W average) running for 6 hours costs about 22 p in electricity. Across 500 prints a year, that is £110 you are giving away if you do not charge it.
Machine depreciation
Your printer cost money. Every hour it runs brings it closer to needing a new nozzle, a new belt, or a complete replacement. Divide the machine cost by your expected lifespan in hours and you get a depreciation rate. Add consumables (nozzles, PEI sheets, PTFE tubes) amortised over their replacement interval, and you have a machine cost per hour.
For a £1,200 printer with a 3,000-hour lifespan, that is 40 p per hour before consumables. On a 6-hour print, that is £2.40 hidden cost.
Labour: often invisible until it is not
Even automated printers need a human to start jobs, clear the bed, post-process, and package. At 20 minutes per print and a £15/hour labour rate, that is £5 per print. If you are doing 200 prints a month, that is £1,000/month of time you might be working for free.
Failure rate: the silent margin killer
No printer is perfect. Entry-level machines can fail 10–15 % of prints on complex geometries. High-end enclosed printers fail 2–4 %. Every failed print costs you material and machine time with no revenue. Build a failure buffer into your pricing — a 5 % failure rate means charging approximately 1.05× your direct cost base to break even.
Putting it together
Use PrintCostCalc to model all five inputs together. The number that comes out is your floor — the minimum charge where you neither make nor lose money. Price above it based on the market, your relationship with the customer, and whether you actually want to spend your Saturday running that job.