Costs and pricing
Almost every printing business that failed, failed at the price.
People give up on earning from a printer for a reason that looks like a market problem and is nearly always an arithmetic problem: they priced from the filament. Here is the whole cost, in a form you can work out once this evening and use for everything afterwards.
- Cost per gram
- Cost per printer hour
- A price you can defend
In short
Price a print as material plus machine time plus your own time, then add a failure allowance and a margin. In practice: cost per gram times grams, plus a cost per printer hour that covers power and wear, plus your hourly rate for the minutes the job actually takes you, plus about 7% for failures.
Cost per gram
Your cost per gram
Take what a spool cost you delivered and divide by its weight in grams. A £16 kilo is 1.6p a gram. Do it per material, because the PETG and the premium matte are not the same number, and redo it when you change supplier.
Then use the weight your slicer reports for the actual plate, including supports, brim and purge. On a multi-colour print the purge is not a rounding error: colour changes can throw away a sizeable fraction of what you buy.
Cost per printer hour
Your cost per printer hour
This covers power and wear, and it is the figure most people leave out entirely. Add up a year of running costs and divide by the hours you expect to print.
- Power. Average watts times hours, at your unit rate. Roughly 100 to 150 W on a typical machine; measure it if you want to be sure.
- Wear. Nozzles, build plates, belts, fans, a bearing, the odd mainboard. Call it £40 to £80 a year on a machine in regular use.
- The printer itself. Spread the purchase over the life you expect. A £400 machine over three years is about £11 a month.
Most single-machine setups land somewhere between 10p and 25p an hour all in. It is a small number, and having it means you can say yes or no to a long print without a feeling.
Your time
Your own time, counted properly
Print time is the printer's; handling time is yours, and it is the only cost that scales with every order. Count it honestly: slicing and preparing the plate, starting it, filament swaps at colour pauses, removing and cleaning the part, assembly, packing, the postage label, the trip, and the message from the customer.
Pick an hourly rate for yourself — even £12 — and put it in the sum. If the job cannot pay it, the job is a hobby, and that is a perfectly good thing to know in advance.
This is also why batching changes everything. Ten units on one plate share one setup, one set of swaps and one trip to post. The margin per unit is identical; your minutes per unit collapse.
The price
Putting it together
Price = (grams × cost per gram) + (print hours × cost per printer hour) + (your minutes × your rate) + about 7% for failures + margin. Then sanity-check it against what the buyer is comparing you with, which for a business is downtime and for a browser is a warehouse.
| Example | A 70 g, 2.5 h print | A 300 g, 9 h print |
|---|---|---|
| Filament at 1.6p/g | £1.12 | £4.80 |
| Machine at 15p/h | £0.38 | £1.35 |
| Your time, 15 min at £12/h | £3.00 | £3.00 |
| Failure allowance, 7% of material and machine | £0.11 | £0.43 |
| Cost before margin | £4.61 | £9.58 |
| Postage, small parcel dropped at a parcel shop | £2.50 | £3.50 |
| So a £10 sale leaves | £2.89 | Under water |
That bottom row is the whole lesson of this page, and it is why big cheap prints sold at marketplace prices do not work, while small, specific, personalised prints do.
A worked example
The same sum on a real per-unit job
Ours, so you can check our arithmetic rather than take a claim. A GigTag with its clamp is 94 g and about 3 h 51 m: £1.50 of filament at 1.6p a gram, 58p of machine at 15p an hour, an M6 bolt and nut at about £0.12, £0.30 for the large-letter box and the A5 card in it, £1.90 to post it as a second-class large letter, and a 15p failure allowance. That is £4.55 of cost against the £9.99 we pay for a UK tag, leaving about £5.45 before your own time. The sum on the franchise page comes out nearer £5.95, because it charges the power a print uses rather than the wear and depreciation charged here. Both are honest; this one is the stricter.
We would rather you see that number now than discover it later. It pays for idle machine time and for the minutes around each plate; it is not a wage, and we do not pretend otherwise.
The terms, the quality bar and the form are on the GigTag franchise page.
Questions
Costs and pricing: your questions
How do I work out what to charge for a 3D print?
Material plus machine time plus your own handling time, then a failure allowance of around 7% and a margin. Use the weight your slicer reports, your real spool price, and the minutes the job takes you rather than the hours it takes the printer.
How much should I charge per hour of printing?
Print hours are cheap — usually 10p to 25p an hour in power and wear — so charging by print hour alone underprices every long job. Charge for your own time separately; that is the hour that is actually scarce.
Should I include postage in my price or charge it separately?
Either, as long as you have counted it. A small parcel is roughly £2 to £3 booked online and dropped at a parcel shop, and over £4 at the Post Office counter, so on a £10 sale it is a quarter to a half of the money. Items that fit a large letter are worth designing for.
What failure rate should I budget for?
Something like one print in fifteen, which adds about 7%, once you are on a profile you trust and a material you know. New materials, tall thin parts and first attempts at a new model run far worse, so quote those with more room.
Is it worth printing for someone else at a fixed price per unit?
Work out the sum above and see. Fixed per-unit work pays less than retail but costs you no selling, and it improves as you learn the part. If the figure covers your costs and makes idle machine hours worth something, it is worth doing; if it does not, say no.
Read next
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