How to Price 3D Prints for Profit: The Complete Guide

I get asked this more than any other question: "How much should I charge for this print?" There's no single right answer, but there is a right method — and most people skip half of it. They weigh the part, multiply by filament cost, and call it a price. Then six months later they're confused about why a "profitable" side hustle is barely covering electricity.

The problem usually isn't bad math. It's that filament is the cheapest, most visible cost in the whole process, so it's the one everyone fixates on. Electricity, your own time, the printer slowly wearing itself out, and the print that just failed at 80% — those costs are just as real, they're just easy to forget because nobody hands you an invoice for them.

Here's the formula I use, broken into six pieces you can actually calculate.

The core pricing formula

$$\text{Final Price} = \text{Material Cost} + \text{Energy Cost} + \text{Labor Cost} + \text{Printer Depreciation} + \text{Failure Risk Buffer} + \text{Profit Markup}$$

Six variables. Skip any one of them and you're quietly subsidizing your customer.

1. Material cost

This part is easy, with one catch: weigh the whole job, not just the part. Supports, rafts, purge towers, and the filament wasted on a color change all came out of the same spool you paid for.

FDM: $$\text{Material Cost} = \left( \frac{\text{Spool Price}}{\text{Spool Weight (g)}} \right) \times \text{Print Weight (g)}$$

A 1kg spool of PLA at $20 works out to $0.02/gram. Your slicer says the job (part + supports) weighs 150g — that's $3.00 in plastic.

SLA: $$\text{Material Cost} = \left( \frac{\text{Bottle Price}}{\text{Bottle Volume (ml)}} \right) \times \text{Model Volume (ml)}$$

A liter of standard resin at $40 is $0.04/ml. A 50ml model costs $2.00 in resin alone, before you've even opened the IPA bottle.

2. Energy cost

Printers don't draw a flat wattage — a heated bed at 60°C pulls a lot more than idle nozzle heating — but for pricing purposes, an average draw across the whole print is close enough.

$$\text{Energy Cost} = \left( \frac{\text{Average Power (W)} \times \text{Print Time (h)}}{1000} \right) \times \text{Electricity Price per kWh}$$

A typical desktop FDM printer averages around 150W. A 10-hour print at $0.16/kWh:

$$\left( \frac{150 \times 10}{1000} \right) \times 0.16 = 1.5 \text{ kWh} \times 0.16 = $0.24$$

Not much per print, but it adds up fast if you're running a few machines around the clock.

3. Labor cost — the one people actually skip

This is where most hobbyists-turned-sellers quietly lose money. Machine time feels "free" once the print starts, but your time isn't, and it splits into two phases:

1. Setup — slicing the file, leveling or cleaning the bed, loading material, starting the job. Usually 10–20 minutes.
2. Post-processing — removing supports, curing resin, sanding, gluing, painting, packaging. Five minutes for a simple bracket, several hours for a painted miniature.

Pick a real hourly rate for yourself — not minimum wage, what your time is actually worth — and bill it. Half an hour at $20/hour is $10 added to the price. If that feels steep compared to the material cost, that's usually a sign the material was never the main expense to begin with.

4. Printer depreciation

Printers wear out. Nozzles clog and abrade, belts stretch, fans die, beds warp, and on resin printers the LCD screen has a finite UV exposure lifespan. None of this is optional maintenance — it's the machine slowly consuming itself, and it belongs in your price.

$$\text{Depreciation Cost} = \left( \frac{\text{Printer Purchase Price}}{\text{Estimated Lifespan (hours)}} \right) \times \text{Print Time (h)}$$

A $1,000 printer rated for roughly 5,000 hours depreciates at $0.20/hour. A 10-hour print carries $2.00 in depreciation — invisible until the day the hotend finally dies and you remember why you were charging for it.

5. The failure buffer

Prints fail. Beds lose adhesion, filament tangles, a nozzle clogs three hours in, the power flickers. If you don't price for failures, every failed print comes straight out of your margin on the ones that succeed — and if you're running prints unattended overnight, that's not rare.

Industry standard is a 10–15% buffer on top of material, energy, depreciation, and labor combined. On a $15 base cost, that's an extra $1.50 set aside to absorb the print that doesn't make it.

6. Profit markup

Last step, and it's not the same as your hourly labor rate (that's already covered in step 3). This is the money that stays in the business — funding the next printer, covering the slow months, making the whole thing worth doing.

• Friends and hobby orders: 20–30%
• Commercial B2C (Etsy, Shopify): 50–100%
• B2B / rapid prototyping: 100–200%+, because fast turnaround and tight tolerances are worth paying for

Doing this by hand every time gets old fast

I built 3D Costify because I was running these six calculations manually for every quote and got tired of it. Upload a G-code or STL file and it pulls print time and weight automatically, applies your electricity rate and printer profile, factors in depreciation, and — if you sell on Etsy or Shopify — backs out their fees so your target profit actually survives the transaction.

It's free, it runs in your browser, and your files never leave your device. Try the calculator and see what your last "profitable" print actually cost you.