Running a standard FDM 3D printer costs roughly $0.15 to $0.60 per hour when you factor in electricity, filament, and wear on parts. Resin printers fall in a similar range for electricity but can cost more in materials and consumable replacements. The exact number depends on your printer type, what material you’re using, and how fast you’re printing.
Electricity: The Smallest Part of the Bill
Electricity is what most people think of first, but it’s actually the cheapest part of running a 3D printer. A typical FDM printer draws 100 to 250 watts during active printing. During the first few minutes, when the heated bed and nozzle are warming up, power consumption spikes higher. A Bambu Lab A1, for instance, peaks at about 265 watts during heating, then settles into a sustained draw of 185 to 220 watts while extruding filament.
At the current U.S. average residential electricity rate of roughly 16 cents per kilowatt-hour, a printer drawing 200 watts costs about 3.2 cents per hour to run. Even a larger printer pulling 250 watts only costs 4 cents per hour. Over a 10-hour print, that’s 30 to 40 cents in electricity.
Resin printers use even less power. Most consumer LCD resin printers draw 50 to 100 watts, putting their electricity cost at 1 to 2 cents per hour. If electricity cost were the only factor, 3D printing would be almost free to run.
Filament Costs for FDM Printers
Material is where the real cost accumulates. How much filament you burn through per hour depends on your layer height, line width, and print speed. A common setup (0.2 mm layer height, 0.45 mm line width, 70 mm/s speed) pushes out about 6.3 cubic millimeters of plastic per second. With PLA’s density of about 1.24 grams per cubic centimeter, that works out to roughly 28 grams per hour of continuous extrusion.
In practice, your printer isn’t extruding every single second. Travel moves, retractions, and cooling pauses mean real-world consumption is lower. For models with lots of fine detail or thin walls, you might use only 14 to 20 grams per hour. For solid, blocky parts with long straight lines, you could hit 30 grams or more.
A 1 kg spool of PLA currently runs $8 to $15 for basic colors, with specialty filaments like glow-in-the-dark or matte finishes costing up to $25. PETG falls in the same range. Using a middle estimate of $12 per kilogram and 20 grams per hour, filament costs about $0.24 per hour. At higher flow rates with cheaper filament, it could be as low as $0.15. With specialty materials at slower speeds, it could reach $0.50 or more.
Resin Costs Per Hour
Resin printing works differently. Instead of extruding plastic through a nozzle, a UV light source cures liquid resin layer by layer. The amount of resin used per hour depends on the cross-sectional area of what you’re printing and the layer exposure time, not a continuous flow rate like FDM.
Standard UV resin costs about $20 to $24 per liter at current prices. Water-washable resin runs $23 to $36, and tougher engineering resins start around $34 and go up from there. A typical small-to-medium resin print might use 20 to 50 milliliters per hour, putting material costs at roughly $0.40 to $1.20 per hour depending on the resin type and how much of the build plate you’re filling.
Wear, Tear, and Replacement Parts
Every hour of printing slowly wears down components that eventually need replacing. These costs are easy to overlook, but they add up over months of regular use.
For FDM printers, the nozzle is the main consumable. A brass nozzle lasts roughly 500 hours with standard filaments like PLA and PETG before print quality starts to degrade noticeably. Brass nozzles cost $1 to $3 each, adding less than a penny per printing hour. If you use abrasive filaments (wood-fill, carbon fiber, glow-in-the-dark), you’ll need hardened steel nozzles, which cost $8 to $15 but last significantly longer with those materials. Other wear items like PTFE tubes, belts, and build surfaces degrade slowly and cost a few dollars each to replace every several hundred hours.
Resin printers have pricier consumables. The LCD screen that patterns each layer has a finite life. Monochrome screens, which are now standard, last around 2,000 hours. Older RGB screens lasted only about 500 hours. Replacement screens cost $30 to $80 depending on the printer model. At 2,000 hours of life, that’s 1.5 to 4 cents per hour. The FEP or NFEP film at the bottom of the resin vat also wears out. Standard FEP film lasts about 10,000 layers, while newer NFEP and ACF films stretch to around 30,000 layers. Replacement films cost $5 to $15, adding another small fraction per hour.
The Hidden Cost: Failed Prints
Failed prints are the biggest source of wasted money in 3D printing, and most cost estimates ignore them entirely. In university makerspaces and shared labs, studies have found that nearly 41% of prints fail. Experienced home users do much better, with failure rates closer to 20%. Either way, failures account for about 80% of all material waste in 3D printing.
A 20% failure rate effectively adds 25% to your material costs, since one in every five prints becomes scrap. If you’re spending $0.24 per hour on filament, failed prints bump that to roughly $0.30 in real-world material cost. For resin printing, where material is more expensive, the penalty is steeper. Beginners should expect higher waste costs while they dial in their settings and learn which prints are likely to succeed.
Total Hourly Cost Breakdown
Putting it all together for a typical FDM printer running PLA:
- Electricity: $0.03 to $0.04
- Filament: $0.15 to $0.35
- Wear parts: $0.01 to $0.03
- Failed print overhead (20% rate): $0.04 to $0.08
That gives a realistic total of $0.23 to $0.50 per hour for most FDM printing. Budget filament and simple prints push you toward the low end. Specialty materials, complex geometries, or higher failure rates push you higher.
For a resin printer running standard resin:
- Electricity: $0.01 to $0.02
- Resin: $0.40 to $1.20
- LCD screen and FEP wear: $0.02 to $0.05
- Failed print overhead: $0.08 to $0.25
Resin printing typically runs $0.50 to $1.50 per hour, with material being the dominant cost. Engineering-grade resins can push this higher still.
What Affects Your Costs Most
If you want to keep costs down, material choice and print success rate matter far more than electricity. Switching from a $25/kg specialty filament to a $10/kg basic PLA cuts your hourly cost nearly in half. Reducing failed prints by properly leveling your bed, using good adhesion settings, and avoiding overly ambitious unsupported overhangs saves more money than any electricity optimization.
Print speed also plays a role, though not in the way you might expect. Faster printing uses more electricity per hour but finishes sooner, so total energy per part stays roughly the same. The real savings from speed come in reduced wear on components and less time for something to go wrong mid-print. Larger nozzles with thicker layers push more material per hour, increasing hourly filament cost but reducing total print time and overall cost per part.