How to price 3D prints so you actually make money

The most common pricing mistake in 3D printing is charging for filament and calling it cost. Filament is usually the smallest number in the stack. A print that “used $1.20 of plastic” can easily cost you three or four times that once the machine, your time, and the prints that failed are counted. Sell it at a 2× markup on filament and you’re losing money on every order.

Real cost has five parts. Get all five in and the markup takes care of itself.

The cost stack

Filament. Weigh the sliced model in grams, not guesswork. A $25 spool of 1 kg PLA is $0.025 per gram. An 82 g print is $2.05 of material. That’s your floor, not your cost.

Electricity. A typical FDM printer with a heated bed pulls somewhere around 100–150 W in steady state. Call it 0.12 kWh per hour. A 6-hour print at $0.15 per kWh is about $0.11. Small per print, but it’s real, and it scales with your farm.

Machine depreciation. The printer wears out. Nozzles, belts, bearings, a hotend, eventually the board. If a $400 printer lasts roughly 3,000 printing hours before you’ve spent meaningfully on parts and downtime, that’s about $0.13 per hour in wear. Six hours: $0.80. Most people skip this line entirely, which is exactly why their “profit” evaporates when the hotend dies.

Labor. This is the one sellers pretend is free because it’s their own time. Slicing, starting the job, removing the part, cleaning the bed, removing supports, sanding, packing. Fifteen minutes of hands-on time at $20 an hour is $5. On a small order that’s often the biggest single line.

Failure rate. Prints fail. Warping, a layer shift halfway up, a clog, a part that pops off the bed at hour four. If 1 in 10 prints fails, every good print has to carry the cost of the tenth. Multiply the material-plus-machine cost of a print by about 1.1 to absorb a 10% failure rate. Higher for tricky geometry, tall thin parts, or finicky filaments like some PETG and most ABS.

A worked example, end to end

One order: a multi-part product, 82 g total, 6 hours on the machine, 15 minutes of labor.

• Filament: $2.05
• Electricity: $0.11
• Machine wear: $0.80
• Labor: $5.00
• Subtotal: $7.96
• Add 10% for failures: $8.76 true cost

Now price it. If you want a 50% margin — meaning profit is half the sale price, not half the cost — divide the cost by 0.5: the price is about $17.50. Sell at $17.50, keep roughly $8.75.

Compare that to the filament-only trap: $2.05 of plastic × 2 = $4.10. You’d have priced it under half of what it cost to make and felt good about the “100% markup.”

Markup and margin are not the same number

This trips up a lot of shops. Markup is added on top of cost. Margin is profit as a share of the final price. A 50% markup on $8.76 gives a $13.14 price and only a 33% margin. If you’re quoting jobs to hit a target margin, work backward from the price, not up from the cost.

What to charge for setup

Per-gram-and-per-hour math works for repeat prints. It breaks on one-offs, where slicing and dialing in a new model can eat an hour before a single gram extrudes. For custom or first-run work, add a flat setup fee — enough to cover that prep time whether the customer orders one unit or ten. Then the per-unit price covers production, and you’re not donating your design time.

Reprints, rush, and volume

Three adjustments most price lists are missing:

A reprint after a customer-caused change isn’t free. It’s a new print with new material and new machine hours. Price it as one.

Rush jobs bump other work down the queue. If someone wants it tomorrow, that has a cost to the orders it delays, and it’s fair to charge for it.

Volume can come down, but only on the parts that actually scale. Ten of the same plate isn’t ten setups — the slicing is done once. Material and machine time don’t get cheaper, but labor per unit drops, so a modest volume discount can still leave your margin intact.

Price it once, then let the numbers run

Doing this by hand for every order is where it falls apart — you’ll shortcut it under pressure and go back to filament-times-two. The point of getting the stack right once is that you can reuse it. Set your machine rate, your labor rate, and your failure buffer, and every new order prices itself the same way.

If you want to run your own numbers, the 3D print pricing calculator uses this exact stack — material, machine, labor, and the profit you want on top — and shows the margin before you commit a gram.