"Just charge for the filament, plus a bit extra" is how most makers price their first few print jobs. It's also why most makers discover, a few months in, that a "profitable" side hustle is barely covering the cost of the printer itself. Filament is often the smallest real cost in a print job — machine time, electricity, failed prints, and the labour of cleaning up supports rarely make it into the quote at all.
Here's the full cost structure a proper printing quote calculator actually needs, with real numbers, so you can see exactly where the gap between "filament cost" and "true cost" comes from.
Filament typically costs $15-$30/kg, which sounds like it should make most small prints nearly free. A 40-gram print might use $1-$1.50 of material. If that's all you charge for, plus "a bit extra," you're pricing as if your printer, your electricity, and your time are worth nothing — and ignoring that a meaningful percentage of prints fail partway through and need to be reprinted from scratch.
Not just the modelled weight from your slicer — add 5-10% for purge waste (the plastic pushed out when the nozzle primes or changes colour), failed first layers, and support material that gets thrown away. A slicer's estimated weight is a floor, not the real material cost.
Printer wattage × print hours × your electricity rate. A typical FDM printer draws 100-150W during printing; a longer print (8-12 hours for a detailed model) genuinely costs real money in electricity, even if it looks negligible per print. Resin printers use less power but add curing-station and IPA-wash costs instead.
Nozzles wear out, belts stretch, build plates degrade, resin tanks need replacing. Spreading your printer's cost (plus expected consumable replacements) across its realistic lifetime print hours gives you a per-hour wear cost — usually $0.50-$1.50/hour depending on printer class. Skipping this is the single most common omission in DIY pricing, because it's an invisible cost until the day a part actually fails.
Slicing, bed levelling, support removal, sanding, gluing multi-part prints, and packaging all take real time. A model with heavy supports can take longer to clean up than it took to print. This labour needs an hourly rate applied to it just like any other paid work.
Not every print finishes. Bed adhesion failures, layer shifts, and power cuts mean a realistic failure rate of 5-15% depending on model complexity and printer reliability. If you don't build a margin for this into your pricing, every failed print is pure loss that the successful prints have to silently absorb — usually meaning you never notice why margins feel thinner than they should.
A 6-hour FDM print, 65g of PLA, moderate supports requiring 15 minutes of cleanup:
| Cost Element | Amount |
|---|---|
| Filament (65g + 8% waste allowance, $22/kg) | $1.55 |
| Electricity (6 hrs × 120W × $0.30/kWh) | $0.22 |
| Machine wear (6 hrs × $1.00/hr) | $6.00 |
| Post-processing labour (15 min × $20/hr) | $5.00 |
| Failure-rate buffer (10%) | $1.28 |
| Total true cost | $14.05 |
| Suggested price (40% margin) | $23.40 |
Notice that filament — the only cost most people quote against — is barely 11% of the true cost here. Machine wear and labour dwarf it. A maker pricing this job at "$1.55 + a bit" would be charging roughly a sixth of what the job actually costs to produce.
Once the per-job cost engine is right, three more factors turn a cost calculation into an actual client-ready quote:
Doing this math by hand for every job — filament weight, waste allowance, print hours, electricity rate, machine-wear rate, labour minutes, failure margin, markup, batch tier, rush fee, tax — is exactly the kind of repetitive calculation that should live in a saved tool rather than a fresh spreadsheet every time. If you want it done for you with saved material and printer profiles (PLA, PETG, ABS, TPU, ASA, Nylon, resin) and one-click branded client quote exports, our 3DPrintQuote Pro calculator runs the full cost engine and produces both the client-facing quote and your internal cost breakdown in one click.
The full 3D printing cost and client quote calculator. Filament with waste allowance, electricity, machine wear, labour, and failure-rate margin — plus batch discounts, rush fees, and a branded PDF quote export.
See 3DPrintQuote Pro — £15 →