3D Print Pricing Calculator

A sustainable 3D print price covers filament and supplies, electricity, your post-processing time, marketplace fees, and profit — not just grams of plastic. Total cost = materials + (labor hours × hourly rate). Suggested price solves for your target margin and platform fee as shares of the final selling price: price = cost ÷ (1 − margin% − fee%).

Use Detailed mode to break out filament, electricity, packaging, and labor. Use Simple mode when you already know total expenses — for example from your slicer cost estimate plus a flat labor allowance. Bookmark Simple mode at ?mode=simple if you use the quick form every time.

Example (detailed): $2.25 filament + $0.35 power + $1.50 packaging + 0.5 h × $25/hr labor = $16.60 cost. At 40% margin and 6.5% Etsy fee → price ≈ $31.03, profit ≈ $12.41. Compare with our Etsy fee calculator before listing.

Margin and markup are different numbers and confusing them is the most common pricing error. Margin is profit as a share of the selling price; markup is profit as a share of cost. A 40% margin on $16.60 of cost means a $27.67 price, while a 40% markup means $23.24 — the same percentage, more than four dollars apart.

Electricity is usually smaller than people expect and worth checking rather than guessing. A typical desktop FDM printer draws roughly 50 to 150 watts averaged over a job, so a 10-hour print consumes about 0.5 to 1.5 kWh — often well under a dollar. Heated chambers and large-format machines change this materially.

Failed prints are a real cost of doing business and belong in the model. If one job in ten fails, your effective material and machine time cost is about 11% higher than a successful print suggests, so either add a scrap allowance to expenses or build it into the margin rather than discovering it at year end.

Labour is normally the largest line and the one most often priced at zero. Support removal, sanding, priming, painting, assembly, photography, and listing all take time, and pricing them at your real hourly rate is what separates a business from a subsidised hobby. Half an hour at $25 already exceeds the filament in most prints.

Platform fees stack beyond the headline percentage. Marketplace commission, payment processing, listing fees, and any offsite advertising fee each take a share, and shipping labels come out of the same envelope unless the buyer pays separately — sum the actual deductions from a recent payout rather than using the advertised rate alone.

Marketplace fees, payment processing, and shipping labels may add costs beyond platform fee percent — include them in expenses.