Irish printer owners pay the most in Europe for the power.

Filament is the straightforward part: 15 to 25 euros a kilo for PLA delivered, depending on whether you buy from a UK or EU seller and how many spools at a time. That is 1.5 to 2.5 cents a gram, so a 70 g print is roughly 1 to 1.75 euros of plastic.

Power is where Ireland differs. Eurostat had Irish household electricity at about 40 cents a kilowatt hour in the second half of 2025, the highest in the EU. A five-hour print at 120 W is 0.6 kWh, so about 24 cents — two to three times what the same print costs a Spanish or Hungarian printer.

On a long print, Irish power is no longer a rounding error. A machine running 1,000 hours a year costs something like 50 euros to feed, and that belongs in your price.

Eurostat put the EU average household electricity price at about 29 cents a kilowatt hour in the second half of 2025, with Ireland and Germany highest at roughly 40 and 39. Your own tariff is the only one that matters, so take it off your bill, or put a 10-euro plug meter on the printer for a week.

An Post is the default for small parcels and the prices are sane by European standards. Buy the label online rather than at the counter, and check whether what you are sending fits a letter-sized rate before you reach for a box.

• Weigh before you design. Hollow it, cut infill, split it. Every tier you drop is money you keep on every order.
• The UK is now a customs job. Anything crossing to Great Britain needs a CN22 and may attract charges at the far end. Northern Ireland is simpler, but check the current rules rather than assuming.
• Count the trip. One drop-off serving six parcels is a very different hourly rate from six separate trips.

Ireland has an unusually clear threshold. Non-PAYE income under 5,000 euros in a year is declared on your ordinary return. Above it, you register with Revenue as a sole trader and file a Form 11, deducting your real costs: filament, postage, the printer, power, packaging.

VAT is a long way off for a side income — the registration thresholds are 42,500 euros for services and 85,000 for goods at the time of writing — but the income-tax line is not, and 5,000 euros of printing is perhaps a hundred sales.

Figures checked in October 2026 and not advice. Thresholds and PRSI rates move, so confirm the current position on revenue.ie before you rely on any of it.

A population of five million is too small to make a living from a narrow novelty, and big enough to make a living from being the person who prints things. That pushes Irish printer owners towards the work that pays best anyway: replacement parts, trade fixtures, club and GAA bits, signage for local businesses, and anything a farm or a workshop has broken and cannot buy.

Being English-speaking also means competing with British Etsy sellers on search while paying more for power. The way round that is the work British sellers cannot do: local, urgent, collected in person. See what actually sells when you print to order.