What does a print really cost — counting the ones that fail?
Grams and hours off your slicer, filament at your spool price, electricity at your printer's real draw, machine wear as your own figure, and a failure allowance — because the third print sometimes ships the first two's corpses. Everything stays in your browser.
The print
The machine
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper the spool is inventory by the gram: every print consumes its slicer weight, failures log honestly, and each finished piece carries its true cost into the price. See for 3d print & laser makers or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
The slicer knows the grams. This does the money.
Print pricing arguments repeat forever because half the numbers are guessed. The math below is the same math the calculator runs — filament, watts, failures — with the guessable parts marked as yours.
How much does the electricity really cost?
Less than anyone guesses: a 120-watt printer running five hours at 16¢ a kilowatt-hour is about a dime. Hotend and bed cycling means the nameplate wattage overstates the average draw, so even this figure is generous. The takeaway is not that electricity is free — it is that filament and failures are where the real money is, and a pricing argument built on the power bill is standing on a dime.
What should the machine-wear number be?
Yours, because the argument never ends. Nozzles, belts, PTFE tube, the printer itself amortized over its life — print-farm spreadsheets run anywhere from two cents to a quarter per hour depending on the machine and the optimism. This page defaults to zero rather than inventing a figure: put in what your own maintenance actually runs, or leave it out and know you left it out.
Why a failure allowance?
Because the corpses are real spools. A spaghetti detach at hour four costs the whole print's filament and time, and it happens often enough that pretending otherwise just means your successful prints quietly subsidize the failures. Ten percent is a modest default for a dialed-in printer; a new filament, a new model, or a tall thin print deserves more.
What should I charge for a print?
Cost times a markup, and the markup is carrying more than profit: your design or file-prep time, the listening-for-the-first-layer minutes, post-processing, support removal, the failed iterations before the listing photo. Three times cost is a common floor for finished goods. What this page will not do is compute a market rate — your market is your market.