What Does a 3D Print Actually Cost?

Most makers overestimate what a print costs. That palm-sized bracket that ran three hours feels expensive, but the plastic in it is usually pocket change. The real number comes from four or five inputs, and once you know them you can price anything you put on the bed.

Filament

This is the big one for most prints, and it’s the easiest to nail. Your slicer reports the grams a job will use right after you slice it. The cost is:

(grams used / 1000) x spool price per kg

A 1 kg spool of PLA runs about $20, so the plastic costs roughly $0.02 per gram. A 25 g print is 50 cents. PETG and ABS sit in the same ballpark. Specialty rolls like carbon-fiber-filled nylon or TPU cost three to five times more, so price from the spool you actually loaded, not a generic average.

Electricity

Smaller than people expect. A typical FDM printer with a heated bed pulls 80 to 150 W in steady state once it’s up to temperature. The bed and hotend spike higher during heat-up, then duty-cycle down. The formula:

(printer watts / 1000) x print hours x your cost per kWh

Say the machine averages 120 W over a 6-hour print and you pay $0.16/kWh:

(120 / 1000) x 6 x 0.16 = $0.115

About 12 cents. Even on expensive power, electricity rarely breaks a quarter on a normal print. An enclosed machine running ABS pulls more, mostly because the bed sits around 100-110C the whole time, but it’s still cents, not dollars. One safety note while you’re at it: ABS and ASA give off fumes you don’t want to breathe, so run them with the room ventilated or the enclosure vented outside.

Machine depreciation

Your printer wears out. Nozzles, belts, fans, hotends, and bearings all have a finite life, and depreciation spreads the purchase price across the hours it runs before those parts need replacing.

(purchase cost / expected life-hours) x print hours

A $400 printer that realistically lasts 4,000 print-hours before major work costs $0.10 per hour. Your 6-hour print carries 60 cents of depreciation. Set the life-hours honestly. A well-maintained machine with fresh consumables runs far longer, which drops this number. This is the line hobbyists skip and sellers can’t afford to.

Labor and failure allowance (for sellers)

If you’re selling prints, two more inputs matter.

• Labor. Time spent slicing, loading filament, removing supports, sanding, and packing. Pick an hourly rate and multiply by the minutes you actually spend hands-on. Fifteen minutes of finishing at $20/hr is $5, which often dwarfs every other line.
• Failure allowance. Not every print succeeds. If roughly 1 in 10 jobs fails on a given model, add about 10% to your material and machine cost to cover the wasted plastic and time. Push it higher for tall, stringy, or warp-prone geometry.

For personal prints, ignore both. Your time is the hobby.

A worked example

A 6-hour print, 80 g of PLA from a $22 spool, $0.16/kWh power, a $400 printer rated at 4,000 hours, printed for yourself:

Component	Math	Cost
Filament	(80 / 1000) x 22	$1.76
Electricity	(120 / 1000) x 6 x 0.16	$0.12
Depreciation	(400 / 4000) x 6	$0.60
Total		$2.48

Under $2.50 all in, and that’s a chunky 80 g part. Now price the same thing for sale. Add 15 minutes of labor at $20/hr ($5.00) and a 10% failure allowance on materials and machine ($0.25), and you land at roughly $7.73 before any margin. That gap between the hobby cost and the sale price is almost entirely your time.

Where the money actually goes

A few patterns hold across nearly every print:

• Most hobby prints cost well under a dollar in filament. A typical 10 to 30 g part is 20 to 60 cents of plastic. The “this feels expensive” reflex rarely matches the receipt.
• Electricity is a rounding error. Include it for accuracy, never worry about it.
• For sellers, labor dominates. Hands-on finishing time usually beats material, electricity, and depreciation combined.
• Failed prints are the hidden tax. One scrapped 10-hour print erases the margin on several good ones, so tune a model until it’s reliable before you run a batch.

Gyroid computes all of this for you. Log the spool price, your power rate, and your machine’s cost and life-hours once, and every print you record gets a real per-unit cost from the slicer’s gram and time estimates, with optional labor and failure lines for anything you sell.

Start here

Run the filament number first. It’s 80% of the answer for personal prints and takes ten seconds. Add depreciation and electricity when you want the full picture, and layer in labor plus a failure allowance only when money changes hands. Set your spool price, kWh rate, and machine life-hours once, and from then on the cost of any print is just its weight and time dropped into the same five lines.