Pricing 3D prints comes down to a simple formula: add up your material cost, electricity, machine depreciation, and labor time, then apply a markup of at least 20% for profit. The challenge is that most people undercount their real costs, especially machine wear and failed prints, and end up charging too little. Here’s how to calculate each component and set prices that actually make you money.
The Core Pricing Formula
Every 3D print price should account for five cost categories:
- Material cost (filament or resin consumed)
- Electricity
- Machine depreciation
- Labor and post-processing
- Profit markup
The final price equals all those costs added together, multiplied by your markup. A 20% markup is the bare minimum for a side hustle. If you’re running a real business with overhead like rent, packaging, and shipping supplies, you’ll need more. Some sellers use a simple “3x material cost” rule of thumb, which works for quick estimates on small prints but falls apart on large or complex jobs where labor and machine time dominate.
Calculating Material Cost
Your slicer software tells you exactly how much filament or resin a print will use, usually in grams. Multiply the weight by your cost per gram. A standard 1 kg spool of PLA runs about $20 to $25, so your per-gram cost is roughly $0.02 to $0.025. Specialty filaments like carbon fiber nylon or flexible TPU can be three to five times that.
For resin printers, the math is similar but you’ll use volume instead of weight. Standard resin costs around $25 to $40 per liter. Your slicer reports the volume of resin needed, and you multiply by the per-milliliter cost.
Here’s the part most people skip: always add a 10 to 15% buffer on top of your raw material estimate. This covers purge lines, skirt material, support structures, and the occasional failed print. If you price based only on the filament that ends up in the finished part, you’re eating the cost of every bit of waste.
Electricity: Real but Small
Electricity is the smallest line item in most quotes, but it’s worth tracking. A typical hobbyist FDM printer draws about 50 watts on average during a print, which translates to roughly 0.05 kilowatt-hours per hour of printing. At an average U.S. electricity rate of $0.15 per kWh, that’s less than a penny per hour. Even a 20-hour print only costs about $0.15 in power.
Larger or enclosed printers with heated chambers pull more, sometimes 200 to 500 watts. Resin printers with UV curing stations add a bit more. For most hobbyist setups, electricity adds up to 1 to 3% of the total cost. It’s worth including in your formula for accuracy, but it won’t make or break your pricing.
Machine Depreciation
Your printer won’t last forever. Nozzles wear out, belts stretch, stepper motors fail, and print beds need replacing. Depreciation captures this gradual wear so you’re setting aside money for repairs and eventual replacement.
The formula is straightforward: divide your printer’s purchase price by its estimated lifespan in print hours. A $300 printer with an expected life of 2,000 print hours costs $0.15 per hour of use. A $1,000 printer lasting 3,000 hours costs $0.33 per hour. Factor in another 10 to 20% on top for replacement parts like nozzles, build plates, and belts you’ll swap during that lifespan.
If you own multiple printers or have upgraded over time, calculate this per machine. A well-maintained Ender 3 depreciates differently than a Prusa MK4 or a resin printer with an expensive LCD screen that needs periodic replacement.
Labor and Post-Processing
Labor is where most new sellers underprice themselves. Your time has value even when you’re not actively watching the printer. Consider every step: preparing the 3D model, orienting it in your slicer, loading filament, removing the print from the bed, pulling off support structures, sanding, gluing multi-part assemblies, and packaging for shipping.
Rates among hobbyist sellers vary widely. Some charge as low as $3 per hour for simple prints on filament they already own. Others charge $10 to $25 per hour depending on complexity, filament type, and whether the customer needs custom design work. A common approach is to set a minimum job fee, something like $50 for any order, which covers your first hour or two of work, then charge $15 per hour beyond that. This protects you from losing money on tiny prints that still require setup and cleanup time.
Post-processing is especially important to price separately when a customer wants a polished final product. Sanding, priming, and painting a figurine can take longer than the print itself. Specialty finishes like vapor polishing or acetone smoothing justify a 10 to 25% markup above the base printing cost.
A Worked Example
Say you’re printing a decorative item that uses 80 grams of PLA and takes 6 hours to print, plus 45 minutes of post-processing (support removal and light sanding).
- Material: 80g × $0.025/g = $2.00, plus 15% waste buffer = $2.30
- Electricity: 6 hours × 0.05 kWh × $0.15/kWh = $0.045
- Depreciation: 6 hours × $0.15/hr = $0.90
- Labor: 0.75 hours setup/post-processing × $20/hr = $15.00
- Subtotal: $18.25
- 20% profit markup: $3.65
- Total price: $21.90
Notice that the filament, the thing most beginners fixate on, is barely 10% of the final price. Labor dominates. This is why the “3x material cost” shortcut ($6.90 in this case) would have you selling at a loss. It only works for prints you can start and forget with virtually no post-processing.
Three Common Pricing Methods
Price Per Gram
Charging by weight is the simplest approach. You set a rate per gram (commonly $0.05 to $0.20 for standard plastics) that bakes in your overhead. It works well for bulk orders of simple parts, but it doesn’t account for prints that are lightweight yet take a long time due to fine detail or thin walls.
Price Per Print Hour
Charging by machine time (typically $1 to $5 per hour for FDM, higher for resin or metal) captures complexity better. A slow, intricate print with lots of retractions and supports costs more than a fast, simple one, which makes sense. This method is common among service bureaus and works well when print time is the main bottleneck.
Price Per Cubic Centimeter
Professional suppliers often quote by volume, typically $0.10 to $0.50 per cubic centimeter for plastics and $10 to $100 per cubic centimeter for metal printing. This method is standard for industrial and metal parts but less intuitive for hobbyist sellers.
Many successful sellers combine approaches: a per-gram material charge plus a per-hour machine rate plus a flat labor fee. This hybrid captures all three cost drivers and scales properly across different job sizes.
Don’t Forget Platform Fees
If you sell through an online marketplace, the platform takes a cut that you need to price in. Etsy charges 6.5% of each sale price plus $0.20 per listing. Shopify’s basic plan costs $39 per month with lower per-transaction fees of 2.9% plus $0.30 per sale. At $1,000 in monthly sales, the total fees are roughly similar: about $65 on Etsy versus $69 on Shopify (including the subscription).
The key difference is volume. Etsy’s percentage-based fees scale directly with revenue, making it cheaper if you’re just starting out with low sales. Shopify’s flat monthly fee becomes more cost-effective once you’re consistently moving higher volume. Either way, add the fee percentage to your markup so you’re not paying the platform out of your profit margin.
Building In a Failure Buffer
Failed prints are an unavoidable cost of doing business. A bed adhesion failure 15 hours into a 20-hour print wastes both filament and machine time. Rather than absorbing these losses randomly, build a failure fund into every quote.
The standard recommendation is a 10% markup on every job specifically for failures. If you track your actual failure rate over time and it’s lower, you can reduce this. If you’re printing experimental materials or complex geometries with higher failure rates, bump it to 15%. This small buffer keeps individual failures from wiping out your profit on other jobs.
Using Pricing Calculators
If building spreadsheets isn’t your thing, several online tools automate the math. Platforms like Xometry, Protolabs, and Fictiv let you upload a 3D model and receive an instant quote that factors in material, print time, and finishing. These are designed for customers ordering from professional services, but they’re useful as benchmarks. Upload your own model to see what a professional service would charge, then use that as a ceiling or reference point for your own pricing.
For your own quoting, simpler spreadsheet-based calculators work well. The inputs you need are: filament cost per kg, print weight in grams, print time in hours, your hourly machine rate (depreciation plus electricity), your hourly labor rate, and your target markup percentage. Plug those into a basic formula and you’ll have a consistent price for every job without guessing.
Pricing for Profit vs. Pricing for the Market
Cost-based pricing tells you the minimum you can charge without losing money. Market-based pricing tells you what people will actually pay. You need both.
Check what similar items sell for on Etsy, at local maker markets, or in relevant online communities. If your cost-based price for a custom lithophane is $25 but similar ones sell for $40 to $60, you have room for a healthy margin. If your cost-based price for a basic phone stand is $15 but competitors sell them for $8, you either need to find efficiencies or skip that product.
Custom and one-off work commands higher prices than commodity prints anyone can download from free model sites. Design work, where you’re creating or modifying a 3D model to a customer’s specifications, is worth $20 to $50 per hour or more depending on complexity. If you have CAD skills, charge for them separately. That’s a service most hobbyist printers can’t offer, and customers expect to pay for it.