The Real Cost of a 3D Print

1. Material (filament)

The most visible cost and the one everyone remembers. The calculation is straightforward: filament weight in grams multiplied by cost per gram.

Remember to include supports and waste material in your weight estimate. A model that weighs 150 g might use 170–180 g of filament once supports, brims, and purge lines are included. Use your slicer's total filament estimate, not the model weight.

Also factor in shipping costs for the filament itself. If you paid £4 delivery on a £20 spool, your real cost is £24/kg, not £20/kg.

2. Electricity

Every hour your printer runs, it draws power. The formula is simple: wattage × hours × electricity rate.

An Ender 3 draws about 120 W once the bed and hotend are at temperature. A Bambu Lab X1C pulls closer to 150–180 W during active printing. At the current UK average of roughly £0.245/kWh, a 10-hour print on an Ender 3 costs £0.29 in electricity.

Individually small, but it compounds. If you run a printer for 200 hours a month, that is £5.88 in electricity — enough to eat into thin margins. See our electricity costs guide for a deeper breakdown by printer model.

3. Labour

The cost most sellers undervalue or ignore entirely. Your time has a monetary value, and 3D printing involves more hands-on work than people realise:

• Design and slicing: Preparing the model, adjusting settings, orienting for best quality, generating supports. This can take 5–30 minutes depending on complexity.
• Setup: Loading filament, cleaning the bed, starting the print, monitoring the first layer. Typically 5–10 minutes.
• Post-processing: Removing supports, sanding, cleaning up stringing, painting or finishing. Simple models take 5 minutes; detailed ones can take 30 minutes or more.
• Packaging and dispatch: Wrapping, boxing, printing labels, walking to the post office. Budget 10–15 minutes per order.

At a modest £12/hour, even 20 minutes of total hands-on time costs £4.00. On a print that uses £3 of filament, labour alone exceeds your material cost.

4. Wear, maintenance, and depreciation

3D printers are not maintenance-free. Nozzles wear out, belts stretch, heatbreaks clog, PEI sheets lose adhesion, and eventually major components need replacing. Budget a maintenance cost per print hour to spread these expenses evenly.

A reasonable maintenance allowance for a well-maintained printer is £0.05–0.15 per print hour. On a 10-hour print, that adds £0.50–1.50.

Depreciation is separate. If you paid £400 for a printer and expect it to last 4,000 print hours, each hour costs £0.10 in depreciation. A 10-hour print carries £1.00 of that original purchase price.

5. Packaging

If you sell online, every order needs packaging. This is not just the postage cost (which the customer often pays) — it is the materials you use to protect the print during transit.

• Small padded envelope: £0.30–0.60
• Cardboard box (small): £0.40–0.80
• Bubble wrap / tissue paper: £0.10–0.30
• Thank-you card and sticker: £0.10–0.25
• Tape and labels: £0.05–0.10

Total packaging per order typically runs £0.80–1.50. Branded or premium packaging pushes that higher, but it can justify a higher selling price too.

6. Waste and failed prints

Print failures are a cost of doing business. Even experienced operators see failure rates of 3–5% on well-tuned machines. Less experienced users or complex models can hit 10–15%. A failed print wastes filament, electricity, and printer time — you pay for all of those without getting a sellable product.

The cleanest way to handle this is a waste percentage applied to your subtotal. If 1 in 20 prints fails, add 5% to your costs. If 1 in 10 fails, add 10%. This spreads the cost of failures across your successful prints.

7. Platform fees

If you sell on Etsy, eBay, Amazon, or any other marketplace, the platform takes a cut. Etsy's combined fees (listing, transaction, and payment processing) typically total 10–13% of the sale price. eBay is roughly 12–13%. Amazon can be 15% or more depending on your category.

These are not optional costs — if you sell on a platform, the fees are a real cost of that sale. They should be factored into your price, not discovered after the fact. Read our Etsy fees guide for a detailed breakdown.

Putting it all together

Here is a realistic full-cost example for a medium-sized PLA print (150 g, 7 hours, Ender 3, sold on Etsy):

Material was £3.30 — just 32% of the total. If you had priced this print based on material alone with a 3× multiplier, you would charge £9.90 and lose money on every sale.

The “3× material cost” myth

A common rule of thumb in 3D printing communities is to charge 3× your material cost. Sometimes it works out — but only by coincidence. On a large, simple print with low labour, the multiplier might be generous. On a small, fiddly print with lots of post-processing, it can leave you underwater.

The problem with multipliers is that they assume a fixed ratio between material and all other costs. That ratio changes with every print. A 500 g vase with 5 minutes of post-processing has a very different cost profile to a 50 g miniature with 30 minutes of support removal. Use actual costs, not shortcuts.