Watch: Price a 3D Print in 60 Seconds

Most sellers price 3D prints the same way: weigh the part, multiply by spool price, maybe double it. It feels reasonable — until you realise you've been working for free.

This 60-second video walks through the calculator and shows exactly why the math is more interesting than it looks.

Why "weight × 2" quietly underprices you

Here's the trap. A 40 g PLA print on a $20/kg spool costs about $0.80 in filament. Double it and you'd charge $1.60 — and feel like you made a dollar. But that number ignores the three-plus hours your printer ran, the electricity it drew, the wear on the nozzle and belts, the one-in-ten print that fails, the time you spent slicing and packing, and the bag and label it shipped in. Add those up and the real cost is closer to $5–6. Sell at $1.60 and every order loses you money — you're paying customers to take your work.

The video shows that gap appear in real time as each cost line gets added.

What the walkthrough covers

1. Entering the basics — filament price, model weight, print time. The calculator pre-fills sensible defaults so you're not starting from scratch.

2. Seeing the true cost — every line item appears live: material, electricity, machine wear, failed-print buffer, labor, and packaging. Most of these are invisible until you add them up.

3. Setting your profit — pick a multiplier (×3 is common for simple PLA prints; ×5 or more for custom or multicolor work) or a margin %. Smart insights flag if you're selling below cost or leaving money on the table.

4. Marketplace fees — if you're on Etsy, Shopify, or eBay, the calculator shows exactly what you keep after platform fees and tells you the gross-up price that lands the take-home you actually want.

5. The cost breakdown — a visual breakdown shows where every dollar (or peso, or yen) goes so you can see at a glance what's driving your cost.

The three numbers most sellers forget

If you take nothing else from the video, build these into every quote:

• Machine wear. Nozzles clog, belts stretch, build plates wear out. A small per-print set-aside means your printer pays for its own upkeep instead of eating your profit. More in the hidden costs of selling 3D prints.

• Failed prints. If one print in ten fails, the other nine have to cover it. A 10% buffer turns a ruined plate from a loss into a rounding error.

• Your labor. Slicing, loading, monitoring, removing supports, and packing are real time. Pricing your labor honestly is usually the single biggest correction to a too-low price.

Two things to do right after watching

• Re-price your best-seller first. Run your most-sold item through the calculator before anything else — if it's underpriced, fixing that one product has the biggest impact on your bottom line.

• Save your settings. With a free account you can save the calculation and reuse your printer and electricity defaults, so the next quote takes ten seconds instead of starting over.

Try it yourself

The calculator is free — no account needed to start. Open it, plug in a real print you've done, and see if your old price still holds up. Most sellers are surprised by how far off "weight × 2" really was — and how a genuinely fair price is still completely reasonable for the buyer.