How to price your 3D prints

Most of us avoid pricing. We started our 3D printing business the same way: guessing at numbers, rounding to whatever felt fair, and hoping the order was worth our time. It usually was not. So we built a formula we could run on every quote. Here it is.

Start with your costs, not someone else's price

The most common mistake is pricing by what other shops charge. That tells you what the market will tolerate, not whether a job is profitable for you. Your printers, filament and time are not the same as theirs. Start from your own costs and work up, and check the market afterwards.

The four numbers behind every print

Every print you sell has four costs.

Material

In your slicer find the weight of the print in grams and multiply by your cost per gram. If a spool costs $25 for 1000 grams, that is 2.5 cents per gram, so a 60 gram print uses $1.50 of filament. Then add a little for supports, rafts and the occasional failed print. We add 15 percent on top of raw material to cover waste, and that has held up well. Your cost per gram is only as good as your spool records, so it pays to track filament stock without a spreadsheet.

Machine time

Your printer costs money to run whether you are watching it or not. Add up the power it draws, the wear on nozzles and belts, and the replacement cost of the machine spread across its life. Turn that into an hourly rate, then multiply by the print time your slicer reports. Even a rough rate beats pretending machine time is free.

Labor

This is the number people forget, and it is usually the biggest. Model prep, slicing, starting the print, removing supports, cleaning, sanding, packing and answering messages all take real time. Track it for a week and the total will probably surprise you. Pay yourself a proper hourly wage for that work, because if you don't, you have bought yourself a job that pays nothing.

Overhead

Rent, software, storage bins, shipping supplies and the other costs of being a business. Spread a small flat amount across every order to cover them.

Add your margin on top

Those four numbers added together are your cost, not your price. Without margin you cannot pay for the next printer. We add a markup on top of total cost and don't apologize for it. It also pays for the slow months and the mistakes.

A worked example

Say a custom desk organizer uses 60 grams of filament, prints in 5 hours, and takes 30 minutes of hands on work.

• Material: $1.50 plus 15% waste, so about $1.73
• Machine time: 5 hours at your hourly machine rate
• Labor: half an hour at your wage
• Overhead: a small flat amount per order

Add those together for your true cost, then apply your markup. The result will almost always be higher than your guess, and the gap is profit you did not charge for.

The mistakes we made early on

We priced by feel and undercharged for months. We forgot to pay ourselves for labor, so our busiest weeks made us poorer. We competed on price with shops that had cheaper machines, and we won orders that were never worth having. Fixing those three things did more for the business than any new printer.

Pricing with FoxTrack

When a customer asks why a print costs what it costs, you should be able to walk them through it. You can only do that if you track your numbers. We built FoxTrack for that: the cost of every print, spool and order sits in one app instead of a dozen spreadsheets.