How to Price Your 3D Prints (Without Guessing): The Real Cost Math
Most people selling 3D prints price the same way: glance at what a filament spool cost, multiply by "feels about right," and post it on Etsy. Then months later they wonder why the bank balance never grows. The reason is almost always the same — the price covered the plastic, but not the business.
Here's the full math, the way a profitable print farm actually does it.
The five costs hiding in every print
A sale price has to cover five things, not one:
- Material — the actual grams of filament or resin in the part, at what you paid per kg.
- Electricity — the printer draws power for hours. It's small per print, but it's real.
- Machine wear — nozzles, belts, build plates, and the printer itself depreciate. Every print "uses up" a slice of the machine.
- Labor — slicing, starting prints, removing supports, post-processing, packing. Your time is the most expensive input and the one everyone forgets.
- Fees & packaging — Etsy/eBay/Shopify take a cut, payment processors take a cut, and the box, bag, and label cost money too.
The formula
Unit cost = material + electricity + machine wear + labor + packaging
Price = (Unit cost) ÷ (1 − target margin %) ÷ (1 − marketplace fee %)
Dividing (instead of just adding a markup) is the part most sellers get wrong. If you want a 50% margin and Etsy takes ~10%, you can't just add 50% — the fee eats into your margin. Dividing protects it.
A worked example
Say you sell an articulated dragon:
- Material: 80 g of PLA at $20/kg → $1.60
- Electricity: 6 h print at 120 W, $0.16/kWh → $0.12
- Machine wear: ~$0.05/print hour × 6 h → $0.30
- Labor: 15 min handling at $15/h → $3.75
- Packaging: box + label → $0.70
Unit cost = $6.47. Notice labor is more than half of it — that's normal, and it's exactly why "filament cost × 3" pricing quietly loses money.
Now apply a 50% target margin and a 10% Etsy fee:
$6.47 ÷ 0.50 ÷ 0.90 = $14.38
So $14.38, not the "$8, filament was cheap" number most people would post.
Why spreadsheets break down
The formula is simple for one product. It falls apart when you have 40 SKUs, filament prices that change with every spool, and orders coming from three channels. Update one material cost and you'd have to re-do every recipe by hand. That's where most sellers give up and go back to guessing.
This is the exact problem WorkBenchy was built to solve: you enter your materials and rates once, attach materials to each product, and it calculates true profit per order automatically. Log orders from Etsy, eBay, or Shopify manually or via CSV import, and when a filament price changes every product updates itself. You can try the profit calculator free, no card required.
The one habit that matters
Whatever tool you use — spreadsheet or software — price from cost, not from vibes, and always include your labor. Do that and you'll never again discover, three months in, that your best-selling product was your biggest loss.