How to price 3D prints

A defensible price for a 3D print has five cost components —material, machine time (electricity plus wear), labor, extras (hardware, packaging) and a failure allowance — with a profit marginapplied on top. Add the costs, divide by (1 − failure rate), then divide by (1 − margin). That is the whole method; the rest of this guide puts real numbers on it. To skip the arithmetic, the price your prints calculator does these exact steps, and the quote workspace handles multi-part jobs and batches.

The five cost components

• Material — grams used × price per gram. Get the weight from your slicer; the filament cost calculator converts spool price into cost per print.
• Machine time — electricity (watts × hours × your kWh rate) plus wear: the printer's purchase price spread over its expected lifetime hours, plus a per-hour maintenance allowance for nozzles, belts and PEI sheets. The print time cost calculator combines both.
• Labor — your hands-on minutes (prep, post-processing, packing) at an hourly rate you would accept doing anything else.
• Extras — anything that goes in the box: magnets, screws, inserts, packaging.
• Failure allowance — failed prints still consume material and machine time. At a 10% failure rate only 90% of prints can be sold, so costs are divided by 0.9 to spread the losses across the good ones.

Only then comes margin — a true margin on the sale price, not a markup on cost (see the mistakes section below).

Worked example, step by step

A small PLA bracket: 80 g of filament, 6 hours on a 150 W printer, 20 minutes of hands-on work. Inputs: PLA at €20/kg, electricity at €0.30/kWh, a €300 printer amortized over 2,000 hours plus €0.10/h maintenance, labor at €25/h, 10% failure rate, 25% margin.

Two things worth noticing. First, labor dominates: €8.33 of the €11.70 subtotal is your time, not plastic or power — material is rarely the expensive part of a print. Second, both divisors matter: quoting €11.70 × 1.25 = €14.63 instead of dividing would hand back €2.71 of margin on every sale. These are exactly the formulas the price your prints calculator uses, so you can reproduce this example there.

Batch effect: quantity changes the price

One-time work — slicing, file prep, test print — is paid once per order, not once per part, so it shrinks per unit as the batch grows. Add 45 minutes of setup at €25/h (€18.75) to the bracket above:

• Order of 1 — labor is 20 + 45 = 65 min = €27.08; subtotal €30.45; ÷ 0.9 ÷ 0.75 = €45.12.
• Order of 10 — setup is €18.75 ÷ 10 = €1.88 per unit; labor €10.21; subtotal €13.58; ÷ 0.9 ÷ 0.75 = €20.12 per unit.

Same part, less than half the price — this is why single custom prints feel expensive and why quoting a batch blind with the single-unit price scares customers off. The quote workspace amortizes setup across the batch automatically and shows both the per-unit and whole-order price.

Common pricing mistakes

• Ignoring the failure rate. A 10% failure rate is not a 10% cost increase — you divide by 0.9, and at higher failure rates the difference grows fast. Spaghetti happens; price for it.
• Confusing markup with margin. 25% margin = divide cost by 0.75 (≈ 33% markup). 25% markup = multiply cost by 1.25 (only a 20% margin). Decide which one you mean and keep it consistent.
• Free labor. "The printer does the work" is how side businesses quietly pay €3/h. Count every minute you personally spend, including messages with the customer.
• Charging filament at purchase price but forgetting waste. Supports, skirts, purge lines and brims are material you paid for and cannot sell.

Selling on Etsy

Etsy takes several cuts of each sale — a listing fee, a transaction fee on the item plus shipping, and a payment-processing fee, with offsite-ads fees on top if you use them. The rates change, so check Etsy's current fee page before setting prices rather than trusting any article (this one included). Two practical points: the fees are charged on thesale price, so add them before or alongside your margin — either raise the margin to absorb them or treat them as an extra cost line — and they apply to what you charge for shipping too, so "free shipping" baked into the price is also fee'd. The 25% margin in the example above is your margin before marketplace fees.