How much should you charge for a 3D print?

It is the question everyone asks at their first quote, and the answer found everywhere — “a price per gram” — is the one that loses money. I have been a printer for over fifteen years. Here is how I build a price, item by item, with a real job I first invoiced badly.

Why the price per gram doesn't work

A price per gram covers one thing only: material. Yet on an ordinary part, material is rarely more than 15% of what it really costs. The rest is time: the machine's, your hands', the time spent on the file. And that time is what gets “forgotten”, because it can't be weighed.

Proof from my own job: twelve PETG parts for a patio awning, made to the customer's model (he supplies the model, I reproduce it), two prototypes before the right one because a detail was missing on the supplied model. I invoiced €70, by guesswork. Done properly, the same job is worth €111.29. €41.29 was missing — 37%.

The six items of a fair price

1. Material. The spool price divided by 1,000, plus supports and an allowance for failed prints. A €25 spool of PLA gives €0.025/g of raw material; with supports, purges and failures you land at €0.035/g for PLA, €0.04/g for PETG. Resin is counted per millilitre (€0.04 to €0.085/ml depending on the resin), never per gram.

2. Machine time. While the printer runs it is unavailable for anything else, it draws power (0.3 kWh for two hours, about ten cents), and it keeps you on call. I count €2 per hour of printing. This is not labour: it is the cost of occupying the machine.

3. Wear. A €600 printer that will do 4,000 hours in its life is €0.15 per hour, before counting the nozzles, belts and build plate you replace. The item is small, but it is real, and it is the one nobody counts. Don't inflate it either: for a long time I set €0.50/h, and on twelve two-hour parts that came to €12.72 of wear, a figure I couldn't justify to the customer.

4. Post-processing. Removing supports, sanding, cleaning, washing and curing a resin part: that is your time, at your hourly rate. I count €20/h, and I count it for the whole batch, not per part — a quarter of an hour for twelve parts is a quarter of an hour.

5. Work on the file. Checking the supplied file is printable (€2 to €4 depending on whether it is supplied, found online or to be created), and above all design when there is no file: €23/h to model from scratch, €21/h to reproduce a part to a model. That is the item missing from my €70.

6. Prototypes and failures. If a part needed two attempts before it was right — because the model was incomplete, because the customer changed their mind — those attempts cost material and time. They count, and they are told to the customer before, not after.

The full example

Twelve PETG parts, 33.53 g and 2.12 h of printing each (the slicer's figures, not an estimate), a quarter of an hour of post-processing for the batch, an hour and a half on the model:

Material is €16 out of €111. Had you charged “per gram” at €0.10/g — which already sounds expensive — you would have asked for €40.

So how much is that per gram?

Since everyone wants a number: this job comes to €0.28/g, seven times the price of the material. But the same job without the modelling would be €0.20/g, and a large hollow part printed fast would be somewhere else again. There is no right price per gram: there is a right price per job, and it is built every time.

The five mistakes I see most often

Forgetting prototypes and failures. Counting resin per gram like filament. Not charging post-processing time because “you do it in front of the TV”. Giving a stranger a friend's price. And redoing the maths by hand at every quote, until the day you no longer have the heart for it and go back to guesswork.

What follows the price: the quote, then the invoice

A fair price is worthless if it isn't written down. A dated, numbered quote, then an invoice with the mandatory details — and, for French micro-businesses, electronic invoicing becoming mandatory for issuing in September 2027. That is the subject of another guide.