Running a 3D printing business

Price from cost, not from grams

Charging a flat rate per gram is simple, and it loses money on slow prints. At $0.15 per gram, a 52 g phone stand sells for $7.81whether it prints in three and a half hours or nine. With the same rates for everything else, the 3.5-hour version costs $8.08 to make; the 9-hour version costs $15.14. Per-gram pricing hides the hours, and hours are what your printer and your time are actually selling.

Work out the cost to make first — material, electricity, machine time, failed prints and finishing — then set the price from it.

Set an honest machine rate

The machine rate is what one hour of printing has to earn to keep the printer running and pay for the place it sits. A simple way to set it:

1. Wear and replacement. Add what the printer cost to the spare parts you expect to buy over its life (nozzles, belts, build plates, a hot end or two), then divide by the hours it will print. A $800 printer with $400 of parts over 6,000 hours is $0.20 per hour.
2. Overhead. Take your monthly share of rent, insurance, software and consumables — say $60 — and divide it by the hours the printer actually prints in a month. At 30% utilisation that is about 219 hours, or $0.27 per hour.
3. Add them up. Here, about $0.47 per printed hour. The calculator starts at a more cautious $1.20, which suits a printer that is busy less often or sits in paid workspace — use your own figure.

Utilisation is the number that matters most. A printer that is idle most of the week has to charge more for each hour it does print; filling idle hours is the cheapest way to lower your prices.

Pay yourself for the hands-on minutes

Removing supports, sanding, packing, answering messages and walking to the post office are all work. Put the minutes per order into post-processing and set a labor rate you would accept for that work. Ten minutes at $15 an hour adds $2.50 to every order — on small parts that is often more than the material. For one-off jobs, a minimum order price covers the time spent quoting and setting up.

Platform fees and margin come out of the price

Marketplaces take a percentage of the selling price, and payment processing takes another slice. Add them together for the platform fee — check your marketplace’s current fee page, because these change. Then decide what share of the price you want to keep as margin.

Both come out of the selling price, so the price is worked backwards: price = cost ÷ (1 − fee − margin). With a 10% fee and a 40% margin, the $8.08 phone stand sells for $16.17.

A common mistake is to add 40% to the cost and call it a 40% margin. A 40% markup prices the stand at $11.32; after the 10% fee you keep $2.10, which is a margin of about 19% — well short of 40%.

Quoting customers

Under the calculator there is a quote you can fill in and print, save as a PDF or paste into a message. It shows the unit price, quantity and total, and leaves your costs and margin off. Quotes are valid for 14 days — material and electricity prices move, so do not leave old quotes open.

Two habits keep quotes profitable: ask for the STL before quoting so the volume is measured rather than guessed, and quote batch work per plate rather than per part.

Growing into a print farm

• More printers, same hands. Your labor per print falls when one person runs several printers, as long as jobs are batched so plates finish when someone is there to clear them.
• Batch and standardise. Full plates of the same part share heat-up, travel and finishing setup. See how batching changes the numbers in how much 3D printing costs.
• Track failures and maintenance. Log failed prints per printer for a month and use the real rate. Scheduled maintenance is cheaper than failures halfway through a long job.
• Re-check your machine rate. More printers raise overhead but usually raise utilisation more. Recalculate when you add machines or space.

Selling resin prints? Plate-filling matters even more there — see resin printing costs.