Tips · Published on 6 October 2026 · By the usi3d team

How much does 3D printing cost? The formula for filament, power, wear and time

A medium-sized PLA print costs somewhere between one and three euros to make at home. Filament is nearly always the biggest line, electricity adds only a few cents an hour, and printer wear counts for more than most people expect. If you sell the part, your time and your failed prints change the sum completely.

What goes into the cost of a 3D print

Ask someone what a print costs and they usually think only of the plastic. It is the easiest line to see, but there are four more: the electricity the printer draws, the wear on its parts, the time you put in and the prints that fail and have to be run again.

• Material: the grams of filament in the part, plus supports, brim and the purge line at the start.
• Electricity: print hours multiplied by the machine's average power and the price per kWh on your bill.
• Machine: the share of the printer's price and its consumables (nozzles, PEI sheets, belts, fans) that each printing hour uses up.
• Labour: preparing the file, slicing, removing supports, sanding or painting. Printing for yourself, you can leave it at zero; selling, you cannot.
• Failures: your share of the prints that end up in the bin. A first layer that lets go after two hours costs money too.

The formula for working out what a part costs

With those five lines, the sum fits on one row. Your slicer gives you the grams and the hours (Bambu Studio, OrcaSlicer, PrusaSlicer and Cura all show them after slicing); the rest comes from your spool, your electricity bill and your printer.

Material: the price per gram

Divide the spool price by the grams it holds. A 1 kg spool of PLA at €20 comes to €0.02 a gram; PETG at €24, €0.024. TPU, nylon and carbon-fibre filaments cost considerably more per kilo, and on 500 g or 750 g spools the price per gram climbs even when the box looks cheap.

If your slicer reports metres instead of grams, you need the density: 1.24 g/cm³ for PLA, around 1.27 for PETG and roughly 1.04 for ABS. At 1.75 mm diameter, a metre of PLA weighs about 3 g.

Electricity: hours times power

A desktop FDM printer with a heated bed draws a lot while it warms up and much less afterwards. For costing, the average is what matters: usi3d's calculator starts at 120 W, which is 0.12 kWh for every hour. At €0.25/kWh, a 5-hour print uses €0.15 of power. With ABS or ASA and the bed at 100 °C the average rises; if you want your own machine's figure, a plug-in power meter will give it to you in an afternoon.

Machine: wear per hour

Spread the printer's price over the hours you expect to get from it and add consumables. A €450 printer written off over 3,000 hours is €0.15/h; add €0.05/h for nozzles, a new sheet each year and the odd belt, and you reach €0.20/h. With abrasive filaments a brass nozzle lasts far less and that number goes up.

Worked examples: what three real parts cost to print

Three cases with the same assumptions: PLA at €20/kg, PETG at €24/kg, €0.25/kWh, a 120 W average for PLA and 150 W for PETG because of the hotter bed, and €0.20/h for the machine. No labour, no failures.

Look at the figurine: machine wear (€1) almost matches the plastic (€1.20), while power stays at 15 cents. On long, light prints, such as a hollow scale model that takes 20 hours, the machine can cost more than the filament.

The hidden costs: failed prints and your time

If one print in ten ends up in the bin, each good part carries 10% of the material, power and machine time of the one that failed. On the €2.35 figurine, that is another €0.24. Cutting your failure rate is the cheapest way to make everything else cheaper: a solid first print and fixing each fault promptly save more than any filament deal.

Labour matters when you sell. Ten minutes of preparing, removing supports and packing at €15/h is €2.50, more than all the material in the figurine. Then add marketplace fees, postage and tax: none of those comes out of your slicer.

How to work out the cost with usi3d, step by step

usi3d's 3D print cost calculator runs this sum on the real mesh of your part. It works in your browser, free and without an account, with binary or ASCII STL files up to 50 MB and 750,000 triangles; if you have none to hand, you can try it with a 20 mm cube.

1. Open your STL

   Drop it into the calculator. If the file has holes or flipped faces, fix it first in Repair model: with a broken mesh, the grams will not add up.

2. Enter your spool details

   The starting values are usi3d's standard profile (Bambu Lab A1, 0.4 mm nozzle, PLA at €20/kg and 1.24 g/cm³, 0.2 mm layers, 2 walls and 15% infill). Swap them for your material and slicer settings.

3. Set the supports

   Supports are entered as a percentage of the part's weight. On the figurines we sliced for testing they came out at between 3 and 16%.

4. Add hours, power, machine and labour

   Under “Electricity, machine and labour”, enter the hours from your slicer, the average power (120 W to start), the price per kWh (€0.25), what you set aside per machine hour and, if you sell, your minutes and your rate.

5. Check it against your slicer

   The calculator measures which way each face of the mesh points to share out walls, top and bottom layers and infill. On our closed test meshes it lands within ±2% of Bambu Studio, but it is still an estimate: hours cannot be read from an STL, and colour changes, failures and packaging are not included.

Work out the cost of your STL

How to cut the cost without spoiling the part

• Infill: for figurines and decorative parts, 10 to 15% is enough. Going to 40% only makes sense for parts that carry a load.
• Walls: two 0.42 mm lines handle almost anything that is not mechanical; three or four for parts that get screwed together.
• Layer height: at 0.28 mm you print considerably faster than at 0.12 mm, saving hours of power and machine time. Keep fine layers for faces and detail.
• Supports: orienting the part well saves more than any setting. Tree supports usually use less material than standard ones on figurines.
• Multicolour: every colour change purges filament. If the part can be painted afterwards or printed in pieces, the purge disappears.
• Size: volume grows with the cube of the scale. The same figurine at 120 mm instead of 100 mm weighs roughly 70% more.

If you do not have the model yet, on usi3d you can create it from a photo with Image to 3D or by describing it with Text to 3D, then run it through the calculator before you spend a single gram.

Try it on usi3d: 3D print cost calculator