What Does It Cost to 3D Print a Product?
A plain breakdown of the make cost — material and tiered labor — with the numbers on real products.
Ask what it costs to 3D print something and you get hand-waving. Here is the plain answer: two lines — the plastic, and the time on the machine. And one of them is almost the whole bill. Here are six familiar products, costed at today’s rates, split into the two.
Make cost, split · today’s rates
plasticmachine time
Desk organiser: $1.20 of PLA Basic and $13.50 of machine time. The plastic is 8% of it.
60 g @ $0.02/g · 4.5 h
What the bars show
You are paying for time on the machine. The plastic is a rounding error.
SoA tall, detailed part costs more than a heavy, squat one. Anything that prints faster — vase-mode décor, thicker layers — is cheaper to make.
The two lines, exactly
Plastic: the sliced weight times the filament’s price per gram — about $0.02 for PLA and $0.03 for PETG, ABS and TPU. Machine time: $3.00 per print-hour, pro-rated for shorter prints. Every order is at least $2.00. A phone stand:
You never price infill, supports or layer height yourself — we slice and tune every part, and the price you see is the sliced result. Assembly, if you want it, is a dollar a part. The rule of thumb for costing in your head: three dollars an hour, plus a couple of cents a gram. For real products, the Make-Cost Index prices thirty-six everyday ones live.
What the make cost leaves out
Your platform’s fee and the shipping label are on your side of the ledger. Turning a make cost into a price that covers both is how to price 3D-printed products; costing a single part to the cent, with material and quantity, is the make-cost calculator; and for runs, see what 100 units costs.
FAQ
Plastic (weight × the filament’s price per gram, about $0.02/g for PLA) plus machine time ($3 per print-hour). Small products are a few dollars; large, slow ones are tens.
The machine is tied up for the whole print, while a gram of plastic is cheap. A tall or detailed part costs more than a heavy, quick one.
They change the sliced time and weight, which flow into the make cost. We tune those settings, and you see the resulting price before you order.
No. Shipping and your platform’s fees are separate. The make cost is plastic plus machine time, plus $1 a part if you ask for it to be assembled.
Stop estimating. Drop the file in.
We slice the real geometry and the per-part price comes back in seconds — no account, no form. Assembly $1 a part if you want it.
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