Free 3D print pricing calculator. Enter spool cost, model weight, print hours, wattage, electricity rate, failure buffer, labor, and markup; outputs raw production cost, electricity overhead, wear allowance, and a tiered retail price.
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software
Use when listing a new product on Etsy or quoting a custom job. Re-run with different markups to see your margin sensitivity.
Spreadsheets do this math but require setup. This is a 60-second quote tool.
Material cost = (spool price ÷ spool grams) × object grams. Electricity cost = (watts ÷ 1000) × print hours × $/kWh.
Failure buffer is a % surcharge on top of material + electricity. Labor is computed from prep/post-process minutes.
Suggested retail = raw cost × (1 + markup %). Etsy hobby sellers typically use 50–100% markup.
Etsy hobby sellers typically use 50–100% markup over raw cost. Adjust for product complexity and competition.
Bambu Lab printers average ~120 W; Ender-3 ~250 W during heating. The default is a balanced estimate.
It takes your model weight as a fraction of a full spool and multiplies by the spool price; a 25 g part from a 1 kg spool that cost 20 uses about 0.50 of filament. Failure buffer and wear allowance are then added on top.
Some prints warp, clog, or fail partway and waste filament and time, so charging only for perfect prints leaves you losing money over a batch. A small percentage buffer spreads that expected loss across every successful sale.
Input
$25/kg spool, 80g model, 12-hour print, 120 W printer, $0.15/kWh, 10% failure, $15/hr labor, 50% markup.
Output
Raw $4.78 → Retail $7.17.
Material $2.00 + electricity $0.22 + failure buffer $0.22 + labor $7.50 (12-hour weighted) = $9.94, then markup. The number depends heavily on labor — the example uses a conservative slow-hourly.
The instinctive way to price a print is grams times the per-gram cost of filament, and it undercharges badly. On a typical 12-hour print with 80 g of material, filament is often the smallest of the five costs involved: machine time, electricity, the failure allowance, post-processing labour and material.
Labour is usually the largest and the one most often left out entirely, because it is spread thin — five minutes levelling, ten minutes removing supports, a few minutes sanding. Priced at any real hourly rate that dwarfs the plastic.
The failure percentage is the input people are most tempted to set to zero, and it is the one that decides whether the business works. If one print in ten fails, the nine that succeed have to carry the cost of the tenth — the material, the machine hours and the electricity are all spent whether or not a usable part comes off the bed.
Setting the buffer to your real observed rate rather than an aspirational one is the whole point. A 10% buffer on a 10% failure rate breaks even; setting 0% guarantees you lose money on average while every individual quote looks fine.
Electricity is genuinely small for FDM — a 120 W printer over 12 hours is under 1.5 kWh — but it is included because it scales with the print time that also drives machine wear.
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