Cost is arithmetic, price is a decision
This page adds up what a job costs you and applies whatever margin you tell it to. It does not have an opinion about the margin, and it should not, because the right number depends on your market, your competition, your capacity and what you are trying to build. What it can do is make sure the cost side is complete, because an incomplete cost is how people end up working for nothing while believing they are making forty percent.
The costs that get left out, in rough order of how much damage they do: reprints, your own time, setup, and consumables. Filament is almost never the omission. Filament is the number everyone remembers, and on a typical job it is a minority of the total.
Failed prints are the line that decides whether you make money
A print that fails at hour six has consumed six hours of machine time, six hours of electricity, the filament laid down before it failed, and your attention. No customer pays for it. If it is a customer order, it also has to be reprinted, so the paying unit now carries two units of cost.
The way to handle that in a quote is to divide the machine-side costs by one minus the failure rate. At an 8 percent failure rate, that is a division by 0.92, an uplift of about 8.7 percent on filament, machine time and power. At 20 percent it is a division by 0.8, a 25 percent uplift, and at that point failures cost more than your margin.
Two honest caveats about that model. It assumes a failure wastes the entire print, which is the pessimistic end, since many failures show up in the first layer and cost almost nothing. Against that, it does not charge failures for your time, and a failure that happens overnight costs you a morning of rescheduling and a conversation with the customer. On balance it is roughly right and it is much better than the alternative, which is leaving it out.
The figure to use is your own, counted. Track reprints for a month, per material and per type of job, and you will usually find the rate is bimodal: routine repeat parts almost never fail, and the awkward one-off geometry a customer sent you as a mesh fails constantly. Quote those differently.
Margin, markup and the fee that eats both
Margin and markup are not the same number and confusing them is worth real money. Markup is profit as a share of cost: cost times 1.4 for a 40 percent markup. Margin is profit as a share of price: cost divided by 0.6 for a 40 percent margin. On a $10 cost, a 40 percent markup gives $14 and a 40 percent margin gives $16.67. The mode selector here makes you say which one you mean.
| On $10 of cost | Markup | Gross margin |
|---|---|---|
| 20% | $12.00 | $12.50 |
| 30% | $13.00 | $14.29 |
| 40% | $14.00 | $16.67 |
| 50% | $15.00 | $20.00 |
| 60% | $16.00 | $25.00 |
Platform commission and payment processing come off the top of whatever you charge, not off your cost, so a fee has to be grossed up rather than added. To keep $16.67 after a 10 percent cut you have to charge $18.52, because 10 percent of $18.52 is $1.85. Adding 10 percent to $16.67 gives $18.34 and leaves you short. The calculator divides by one minus the fee for this reason.
Printer hours are the constraint, not filament
Filament can be reordered and arrives in days. Printer hours cannot. If you have two machines you have 48 machine-hours a day at the absolute theoretical maximum and considerably fewer in practice, and every job you accept consumes some of them permanently.
That makes profit per print hour the number worth comparing between jobs, more than profit per unit or margin percentage. A job returning $60 of profit over 40 machine-hours is worth less than one returning $25 over 6, even though the first looks bigger. It also reframes what a rush job costs: the premium is not for effort, it is for displacing the other work that would have used those hours.
The same logic argues for a minimum charge. A job that takes 30 minutes of setup, a filament change and a trip to the post office costs you the same handling whether the print is two grams or two hundred. Below some threshold, the plastic is irrelevant and the whole cost is you. A minimum charge is more honest than inflating the per-gram rate, because it prices the thing that is actually scarce.
What is not in here
This is a job-level quote, not a business model. It has no line for the model design time on a custom job, which can dwarf the printing. It has no line for the fixed costs a business carries regardless of orders: rent, insurance, software, the machine sitting idle. It has no line for customer revisions, returns, or the job you spent two hours quoting and did not win. Those get recovered through the margin, which is part of why a margin that merely covers job costs plus a little is not a viable business, and why cost-plus pricing tends to under-price custom work in particular.
A note on the workspace itself, since quoting for volume usually means running the machines more. ABS and ASA emit styrene and other volatile compounds while printing, and resin printing produces fumes as well; both need ventilation rather than a closed spare room. Uncured resin is a skin sensitizer, and repeated contact is how people develop a reaction that ends their involvement with the process. Neither is a reason not to run the work, and both are reasons to set the space up properly before the volume goes up.
For the cost side in more depth, the filament cost calculator derives the machine hourly rate from a printer price and an assumed life, and the resin print cost calculator covers the equivalent for MSLA work. To get the print hours and filament figures this page needs, use the print time estimator and the infill weight calculator.
Questions people ask
What should I charge per gram?
This page will not tell you, and per gram is usually the wrong unit anyway. Charging by weight prices the plastic, and plastic is the smallest part of what a print costs you. Two parts of identical weight can differ by a factor of five in print time, and print time is your real constraint. If you want a simple published rate, a per-hour machine rate plus a per-gram material rate plus a minimum charge covers the shape of the cost far better than weight alone. Whatever structure you pick, run a few real jobs through this calculator first and check that the structure produces prices above cost across the range of work you actually get.
How do I set a failure rate if I have not tracked one?
Start high and measure your way down. Eight percent is the placeholder here and it is a reasonable starting point for mixed work on a tuned machine. If you print a lot of tall, thin, overhang-heavy or warp-prone geometry, or you run ABS without a stable enclosure, double it. What you want within a month is a count: units started, units delivered, and roughly when in the print the failures happened. Early failures cost almost nothing; late ones cost everything, and if yours are mostly late your effective rate is worse than the raw percentage suggests.
Should I charge for my own time on a hobby-scale side business?
Put it in the cost even if you would have done the work anyway, because leaving it out hides the thing you most need to see. If a job pays $40 and costs $18 in materials and machine time, that looks like a $22 profit until you notice it took four hours of your evening, at which point it is $5.50 an hour. You may still choose to take it, for the experience or the customer or because you enjoy it, and that is a legitimate decision. It is only a bad decision when it is made accidentally by a calculator that pretended your time was free.
Does the platform fee field cover sales tax?
No, and do not use it for that. The fee field is for a commission or payment charge that is deducted from what you receive, so the price gets grossed up to absorb it. Sales tax works differently: it is collected on top of your price and remitted, so it is not your revenue and not your cost, and in many marketplaces the platform handles it for you. Mixing them produces a price that is wrong in both directions. If tax applies to your sales, handle it separately and get the treatment right for where you operate.
Why does the quote go up so much when I lower the quantity?
Because setup and packaging are job costs, not unit costs, and they get divided across fewer units. Thirty minutes of setup at $30 an hour is $15 whether you make one part or fifty; across fifty it is 30 cents each and across one it is the whole job. That is the real economics of small orders and it is why nearly every print service has a minimum charge. Showing the customer the per-unit price at two quantities is often more persuasive than arguing about the minimum, since the discount for ordering more is genuine rather than a sales tactic.