The Real Cost of Buying Another 3D Printer
The sticker is about a tenth of year one. A ledger of the rest — filament, power, failures, and the 137 hours of your time.
A $449 printer that runs 20 hours a week costs about $4,300 in its first year, and the printer itself is about a tenth of that. Most of the rest is filament and your own time: roughly 137 hours of clearing plates, checking parts, packing and maintenance. Put in your own figures and the ledger rewrites itself.
Your figures
Year one
The printer$449
Spares: nozzles, plates, belts$90
Electricity$22
Filament for good parts$952
Filament and hours lost to failures$49
Your time clearing and checking plates$1,387
Your time packing and posting$867
Your time on maintenance$480
The real first year$4,295
The sticker is 10% of year one. The other $3,846 arrives a plate at a time.
A print-hour on it
$4.13
A print-hour, made by us
$3.92
From year two, with the printer paid for, yours falls to $3.70 an hour — more than half of it your own time.
Ours is the make cost of your average plate (92 g, 2 h) divided by its hours, with the filament, the check, a remake if it fails, assembly and packing already in it. 46 g per print-hour is the average across the 36 parts in our Make-Cost Index.
What the ledger is really asking
One more printer is about 137 hours of your year.
At the defaultsAbout 113 hours at the plates and packing bench, and 24 on maintenance. Every extra printer adds its own share.
The number that decides it is hours a week
A printer you keep busy is cheap per hour. Run the same machine 60 hours a week and the sticker almost vanishes into the total. The printer most shops are thinking of buying is not that one, though. It is the extra machine for busy weeks, the one that sits idle in quiet ones. Set the ledger to the hours it would really run, not the hours it could.
At the defaults, an hour on your new printer costs about $4.13 in year one and $3.70 after that. The same hour made by us is about $3.92. The prices are close. The difference is what comes with each hour.
What the ledger does not count
- Space
- A bench, ventilation, somewhere for spools to stay dry, and a printer that is loud at 2 a.m.
- Assembly and hardware
- If your products have magnets, inserts or more than one part, fitting them is more time per order. Choose assembly on a product and we do it for $1 a part, from your own instructions.
- Busy weeks
- The week the printers are full is the week a big order arrives. A partner with a farm behind it takes the overflow, and the 200-unit order, without you buying anything.
- Colours and materials
- Every new colour is a spool you buy before you know it sells. We stock 65 colours across ten materials, including PETG-CF, and buy in anything else against your first order.
- Remakes
- The ledger counts the filament lost to failures but not the customer who waited for the reprint. Ours are remade on our time before anything ships.
Most shops do both
The answer is rarely all or nothing. Keep your printers busy with the listings you enjoy making or that need your hand, and send us the rest by SKU: the slow ones, the ones with hardware, and the overflow when a week gets away from you. Your printers stay at a comfortable load, the backlog disappears, and you did not buy a machine for your worst week. The capacity calculator shows how many you actually need, and overflow explains how the split works.
FAQ
It depends on how many hours a week it will actually run. A printer kept busy 60 hours a week is cheap per print-hour; one bought for busy weeks and idle in quiet ones costs far more per hour it runs. Count your own time too: at our default figures, one more printer takes about 137 hours of your year.
At our defaults — a $449 printer running 20 hours a week — about $4,300: the printer, spares, power, filament, failed prints, and the time spent clearing, checking, packing and maintaining. The printer is about 10% of it.
Far less than people fear. At around 120 W while printing and 18¢ a kWh, 20 print-hours a week is about $22 a year. Check your own printer on a plug meter, as heated beds and enclosures vary.
Many shops do both: they keep their printers busy with the listings they like making and send the rest — overflow, slow sellers, anything with assembly — to a production partner by SKU.
Buy the printer you will fill. Send us the rest.
Match the listings you want us to make by SKU and keep the rest on your own machines. Printed, checked, assembled if you ask, and shipped under your name, with nothing monthly.
Keep reading