Price Per Print-Hour: The Number a Busy Shop Should Track
Rank every listing by what an hour of machine time earns making it, and the decisions about what to raise, cut or send out get easy.
When your printers are the limit, the useful number is not a listing’s price or even its margin. It is what an hour of machine time earns while it makes that listing: price, minus material and fees, divided by print hours. Rank your catalogue by it and the decisions about what to raise, what to cut and what to send out stop being guesses.
The number, and how to get it
Take one listing. Work out, per unit:
- What the customer pays you.
- Minus the material: your sliced weight times what you pay per gram.
- Minus marketplace and payment fees on that sale.
- Divided by the print hours it takes — from your slicer, including any failed-print allowance.
The result is what one printer-hour earns you when it is making that product. Do it for your whole catalogue and sort ascending. The top of that list is what your printers should be doing; the bottom is where your capacity leaks.
Your listings, ranked by what an hour earns
edit any cell
$15.25/ print-hour
sent out to us: $9.80 kept a unit, zero of your hours$10.33/ print-hour
sent out to us: $11.00 kept a unit, zero of your hours$9.30/ print-hour
sent out to us: $12.60 kept a unit, zero of your hours$5.20/ print-hour
sent out to us: $9.90 kept a unit, zero of your hours
Per print-hour = (price − material at $0.02/g − about 10% in fees) ÷ print hours. “Sent out” = price − fees − our make cost at today’s rates, before shipping. The red row is where your capacity leaks.
The reframe
A sold-out shop does not sell products. It sells printer time, and each listing is a different price for the same hour.
When it appliesOnly once your queue stops emptying. With idle machines, an extra sale is nearly free — take every order you can.
Why margin percentage misleads you
The planter above carries a healthy-looking margin. It still earns a third of what the cable organiser earns per hour, because it occupies a machine five times as long. If your printers had spare hours, that would not matter — you would want both. At capacity, every planter you print costs you the organisers you could have printed instead.
What to do with the bottom of the list
01
Raise the price
The cheapest fix and the fastest. Either the listing starts earning its hours, or it stops selling and gives the hours back.
02
Take hours out of the print
Thicker layers, less infill, fewer supports, a shorter Z height. Twenty minutes off a two-hour print lifts that listing’s per-hour number by a fifth, on every unit. Designing prints that sell has the changes worth making.
03
Send it out
A production partner buys the hours back at a known price — the “sent out” figure on each row above. If your best listings earn $10–15 an hour and orders are waiting, that is profitable arithmetic.
04
Retire it
Last, and only after checking whether it brings buyers who then buy something else. A weak listing that feeds your best one is doing a different job.
A worked decision
Say the shop above runs three printers, 14 hours a day, six days a week: 252 hours a week. The planter takes 108 of them. Moving the planter to a partner costs roughly $13.50 of labour a unit and frees 108 hours. Fill those hours with cable organisers at $15.25 an hour and they earn about $1,650 a week. The planters still sell, at a thinner margin, and nothing had to be bought.
That is the whole case for outsourcing by listing rather than by order, and it only works if the demand for your better listings is real. If it is not, the freed hours earn nothing and you have simply given away margin. The capacity calculator tells you whether you are actually at the limit, and five ways out covers the other options.
FAQ
Work out what an hour of your machine time needs to earn, then price each listing at material plus that hourly figure plus your margin. Checking it the other way round is just as useful: take your current prices, subtract material and fees, divide by print hours, and see which listings are underpaying for the time they use.
There is no universal number — it depends on your prices, your market and what your hours cost you. What matters is the spread across your own catalogue. If your best listing earns three times what your worst earns per hour, you have a decision to make about the worst one.
Not automatically. Raise the price first, then try to cut the print time, then consider having them made elsewhere. Retire a listing only if it fails all three and brings you no other business.
No. With idle machines an extra sale is nearly free, so take every order you can get. Price per print-hour starts to matter the week your queue stops emptying.
Add your failure rate to the print time: at a 5% failure rate, a two-hour part really costs about 2.1 hours of machine time. Measure the rate over a month rather than guessing it.
Buy back the hours your worst listing takes.
Match that listing by SKU and its orders come to us; the rest keep printing on your machines. A price per part in seconds, no account needed.
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