What does that print really cost? Enter the filament used (grams from your slicer, or length converted by material), spool price, print time and electricity rate — and optionally printer depreciation, a failure buffer and a seller's markup — for an honest cost-per-print and suggested price.
Filament used
Print time & electricity
Optional: depreciation, failures & markup
Cost breakdown
Material (50 g × $0.020/g)
$1.00
Electricity (3.5 h × 150 W)
$0.08
Printer depreciation
—
Subtotal
$1.08
Failure buffer (+10%)
$0.11
Total cost per print
$1.19
Suggested price (+0% markup)
—
📌 Your slicer (Cura, PrusaSlicer, Bambu Studio) shows the exact grams and print time after slicing — use those numbers here. Selling prints? Remember labor, design fees, packaging and platform fees on top of the suggested price.
Worked example: a 50 g print running 3.5 hours on a 150 W printer, with a $20/1000 g spool and $0.15/kWh electricity. Material: 50 × $0.02 = $1.00. Electricity: 0.15 kW × 3.5 h × $0.15 = $0.08. On a $300 printer expected to last 3,000 print hours, depreciation adds $0.10/h × 3.5 = $0.35. Subtotal $1.43; a 10% failure buffer brings the true cost to about $1.57.
What makers usually forget
Most hobbyists only count filament, and most worriers overestimate electricity. In practice electricity is tiny — cents per print — while the forgotten costs dominate: depreciation (nozzles, belts, beds and eventually the whole printer wear out; $0.05–0.15 per print hour on a typical machine) and failures (spaghetti at 2 a.m., first-layer disasters, warped corners). Even a good setup loses 5–15% of prints, and every failure burns both filament and hours. That's why the failure buffer applies to the whole subtotal, not just material.
Pricing for Etsy and other marketplaces
The suggested price here covers costs plus your chosen markup — but a sustainable shop price also includes labor (removing supports, sanding, assembly, packing — at a real hourly rate, not zero) and design fees (commercial licenses for models, or your own design time amortized over expected sales). Marketplace fees take another slice: Etsy charges a listing fee, a ~6.5% transaction fee and payment processing. A common sanity check: if your all-in price feels "too high", the fix is rarely a lower price — it's faster post-processing or a cheaper-to-print design.
For a typical desktop FDM printer, material is the visible cost: at $20 per 1 kg spool, filament runs $0.02 per gram. A classic 3DBenchy uses about 15 g — roughly $0.30 of PLA. Add a few cents of electricity, and small prints cost well under a dollar in direct costs. The honest total is higher once you spread printer depreciation and failed prints across your output, which is exactly what this calculator does.
A typical desktop FDM printer draws 100–200 W while printing (heated bed cycling included), so about 0.1–0.2 kWh per hour. At the US average of ~$0.15/kWh, a 5-hour print costs 8–15 cents of electricity. Larger heated beds, enclosures and high-temperature materials push it up, but electricity almost never exceeds a few percent of a print’s true cost.
Start from the full cost — material, electricity, depreciation and a failure buffer — then apply a markup, commonly 100–300% for finished goods. On top of that add your labor (print prep, post-processing, packing at a realistic hourly rate), a share of the design fee if you licensed or commissioned the model, and platform fees (Etsy takes roughly 6.5% transaction plus payment processing and listing fees). If a piece takes 20 minutes of hands-on work, that labor usually dwarfs the material cost.
Yes — more infill means more grams and more time, and cost scales almost linearly with filament used. But you don’t need to estimate the effect yourself: slice the model at your chosen infill and the slicer reports the exact grams and print time. Enter those numbers here. Going from 15% to 50% infill on a solid-looking part can easily double the material used with little strength gain for display pieces.
Multiply the filament’s cross-section area by its length and density. For 1.75 mm filament the cross-section is π × 0.0875² ≈ 0.024 cm², so one meter is about 2.41 cm³ — roughly 3.0 g of PLA (density 1.24 g/cm³), 3.05 g of PETG, 2.5 g of ABS or 2.9 g of TPU. The calculator’s length mode does this automatically for each material.