Italy will tax you at five per cent. It will also make you register first.

PLA is 15 to 25 euros a kilo delivered, so 1.5 to 2.5 cents a gram: roughly 1 to 1.75 euros of plastic in a 70 g print. The Italian sellers are competitive and the German ones deliver quickly.

Italian electricity runs above the EU average of about 29 cents a kilowatt hour, so a five-hour print at 120 W — 0.6 kWh — lands somewhere around 18 to 22 cents. Not ruinous, but worth putting in the price rather than ignoring.

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.

Poste Italiane handles small parcels and the private couriers — BRT, GLS, SDA — often beat it when booked through a comparison site. Tracking matters more here than in some markets: buyers expect it and disputes are easier when you have it.

• Book online, drop at a point. The counter price and the queue are both avoidable.
• Islands and remote comuni cost more. Price them separately rather than absorbing the difference.
• Pack for a long journey. A flat printed part crossing the country needs stiffening, not just a bag.

Selling regularly means opening a partita IVA. The regime forfettario is the route most small sellers take: turnover up to 85,000 euros, a substitute tax of 15% that drops to 5% for the first five years of a genuinely new activity, no VAT on your invoices, and a fixed profitability coefficient instead of itemised expenses.

• It is measured on money received, not invoiced, and on the previous year's figures.
• Open mid-year and the limit is prorated to the days you were active, so starting in July gives you roughly half.
• Over 85,000 but under 100,000 and you finish the year in the regime, then move to the ordinary one. Over 100,000 you leave immediately.
• There is a separate limit on employment or pension income — 35,000 euros for 2026 — which catches people printing alongside a job.

Because expenses are assumed by coefficient rather than deducted, the forfettario suits a printer with low costs and can be worse than the ordinary regime if you are buying machines. Checked October 2026, not advice: talk to a commercialista.

Italy is full of things worth repairing and short of the parts to repair them: shutters and window fittings, old appliances, Vespa and classic-car bits, café and gelateria equipment, agricultural machinery, fittings in buildings older than the companies that made them. For a printer owner that is the ideal market, because the buyer has no alternative supply at all.

Subito and Facebook groups carry the local trade; Etsy reaches further into the decorative end. But the margin is in the part nobody else can make. See what actually sells for the filter.