Materials & colors

The following materials print end-to-end on our machines today. Each is a distinct filament family with its own appearance and physical properties.

Materials outside this set, such as carbon-fiber blends, nylon, ASA, and polycarbonate, are not in our print pipeline today. If one is mentioned elsewhere on the site, it cannot yet be selected for a product.

When you select a material, its available colors appear as round swatches beneath it. Each swatch is one specific filament we have in stock, with its own color, price per gram, and density. Different colors within the same material can cost slightly different amounts to print.

Because the swatches are drawn from live inventory, the colors on offer depend on current stock. A color you used last month may not be available this month, and new ones appear as we add them. To see the current range, browse the Material catalog.

Material and color are set inside the product maker while you build a product from your designs. When a product bundles several designs, or several copies of the same design, each copy takes its own material and color. You can, for example, combine a matte body with a silk accent in a single product.

1. 1

   Open the product maker

   From your Catalog, create a product or edit an existing one. In the Build step, add the design files that make up one unit and set how many copies of each you want.
2. 2

   Choose a material

   For each copy, select a material chip. The chips are the material families currently in stock, so the set you see reflects live availability.
3. 3

   Choose a color

   A row of color swatches appears under the selected material. Pick one; the label shows the color name, with its finish included when relevant, such as “Silk Gold.”
4. 4

   Set every copy

   You must assign a material and color to every copy before you can save the product. A product cannot be priced without a real material on each one.

Your material choice feeds directly into the make cost, the amount PrintPort charges your card to produce one unit. The cost is derived from the slice of your file, not from a lookup table.

Weightfrom your file

The sliced volume of the print multiplied by the material’s density gives its weight in grams. Denser materials weigh more for the same shape.

Material costthe driver

That weight multiplied by the chosen filament’s real price per gram from our inventory. There is no fixed price table; each color and material carries its own per-gram price.

Laborper print-hour

A time charge on the print: $3 per print-hour, pro-rated under an hour. A material like flexible TPU can carry a small additional handling factor.

Switching a product from a light PLA to a denser, more expensive filament raises both the weight and the per-gram cost, and the make cost rises accordingly. For the full breakdown, including hardware and break-even, see Costs & pricing and Price your products.

PLA Basic is the baseline. When you upload a design, it is sliced on the PLA Basic profile, so a PLA Basic product is priced from that slice immediately. Selecting any other material, including PLA Matte, PLA Silk, PLA Glow, PETG, ABS, and TPU, triggers a re-slice with that material’s real print profile, because print time can differ between profiles.

Until the re-slice completes, the maker shows the PLA baseline time marked estimate. This is a genuine preview using PLA Basic timing while the material-accurate slice finishes in the background; no action is required. The line re-prices to the accurate weight and time as soon as the slice is ready, and the estimate marker disappears.