pricing
How to Price a 3D Printed Ice Cream Clicker
The Ice Cream Clicker prints in about an hour and sells like candy at maker markets. Here's the real cost of a multicolor clicker and what to charge for it.
Price this print in the calculator
Opens pre-filled with the specs from this article — tweak your own costs and get your real price.
The Ice Cream Clicker by Tunamy is one of those models that just moves at a market table. It's cute, it's colorful, it prints in about an hour, and it has the perfect price point for an impulse buy. 9,000+ downloads, 5,800+ makes, 4.9 stars — people clearly love it.
It's also a great example of where multicolor printing quietly eats your margin if you're not tracking it.
What a multicolor clicker actually costs you
This is a small two-part print — about 11g of filament across two plates — but the cute factor comes from the color change between the cone and the scoop. However you do that color change, it costs you filament you don't see in the final piece.
| Cost item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Filament (11g model + 5g purge × $0.02/g) | $0.32 |
| Keyboard switch (for the click) | $0.40 |
| Electricity (100W × 1h × $0.15/kWh) | $0.02 |
| Machine wear | $0.06 |
| Failed-print buffer (10%) | $0.08 |
| Labor (assembly + QC) | $1.50 |
| Packaging (small bag) | $0.50 |
| True cost | ~$2.88 |
At the default ×2 markup that's about $5.75. But these are pure impulse buys with strong visual appeal — the market supports $8–$12 comfortably.
AMS vs "change filament": the hidden cost difference
This model is designed so you can do the two colors either with an AMS (automatic) or a manual filament change mid-print. Your choice changes your cost:
- AMS — convenient and hands-off, but every color change dumps a few grams into the purge/poop chute. For a 11g model, purge can be 30–50% of the model's own weight. Always include it (the preset above does).
- Manual filament change — almost zero purge waste, but it ties you to the printer to swap filament at the right layer. That's labor, not filament — so it moves the cost from one column to another, it doesn't make it free.
Either way, the cost is real. The mistake is pretending a "two-color" print costs the same as a one-color print. It doesn't.
Speed is the whole business case
At ~1 hour and ~11g, this is a true batch-and-sell product. A single plate can hold several at once:
- 6 clickers per plate ≈ same ~1h of printer time as one
- Per-unit electricity drops to roughly $0.003
- One packaging session covers the whole batch, so per-unit labor falls too
Print a full plate overnight and you've got a market table's worth of inventory by morning. At $10 each, a plate of 6 is $60 of stock from about $17 of cost and one print cycle.
What they sell for
Cute multicolor clickers like this sell on Etsy for $7–$15, with the higher end going to listings that photograph well (and a glossy ice-cream clicker photographs very well). At markets, $10 each or 3 for $25 is a proven impulse bundle.
Print settings
Based on the popular Maker World profile:
- Layer height: 0.2mm
- Walls: 2
- Infill: 10%
- Plates: 2 (cone + scoop)
- Filament: PLA — pick a soft pastel for the scoop and a warm tan/brown for the cone for the most "edible" look
Price yours now
Use the button above to load these specs into the calculator. If you print with an AMS, keep the purge weight; if you do manual color changes, drop the purge but bump your labor time to reflect the babysitting. Then anchor your price to the market — $8–$12 is where this one belongs.