3d Printing Calculator

Background.

Filament is the cost most people think of when they price a 3D print, yet once the printer is charged for its own wear, the plastic is often not the biggest line. A 1 kg spool bought for $25 works out to 2.5 cents a gram, so a 120 g bracket uses $3 of material. Running the printer for eight hours at an average 120 W adds about 17 cents of electricity. Charge the machine $1.50 an hour for nozzles, belts, build plates and eventual replacement, and the same bracket becomes a $15 job.

Those three pieces are worked out separately and added. Material is the slicer's filament mass in kilograms times the spool price. Electricity is the average draw in kilowatts times the hours times your tariff. The machine charge is hours multiplied by a rate you choose; nothing here guesses it for you.

That choice deserves a moment's thought. A hobbyist with a printer that has long since paid for itself might reasonably enter zero, while anyone selling prints needs a rate that will fund the next printer before the current one wears out. Print time also counts twice, once for power and once for wear, so a long print that uses little plastic can cost several times its filament.

Some real costs sit outside the total: failed prints, your time at the bench, removing supports, sanding and painting, sales tax and profit. The support material itself is not missing, because slicers fold it into the filament weight they report. If you sell prints, treat the total as the floor your quote is built on.

What is 3d printing calculator?

The print cost estimated here is the direct cost of running one job on a filament printer: the plastic it consumes, the electricity it draws over the print time, and an hourly allowance for wear and depreciation that you set yourself. The answer comes out in the same currency as the prices you enter, since no conversion happens. It is a production cost, which is a different thing from the price a customer should pay.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01After slicing, copy the filament weight in grams from the slicer's print summary, with supports, brim and raft included. If your slicer shows only metres of filament, switch the display to weight or weigh the spool before and after the print.
2. 02Enter what you paid per kilogram of filament. A 1 kg spool at $25 is simply 25; a 750 g spool at $21 works out to 21 ÷ 0.75 = 28 per kilogram.
3. 03Enter the print time in hours (6 h 30 min is 6.5) and the printer's average power in watts. A plug-in energy meter left on for one whole print gives a true average; the figure on the power supply is a maximum the printer touches only while heating up.
4. 04Enter your electricity price per kWh from your bill, including any per-kWh delivery charges, not just the headline energy rate.
5. 05Set the machine rate. A $600 printer you expect to run for 2,000 hours before replacing it costs $0.30 an hour before spare parts; enter 0 to see only filament and power.

The formula.

Cost = grams ÷ 1,000 × price/kg + kW × hours × tariff + hours × machine rate. The first term converts the slicer's filament mass from grams to kilograms and multiplies by the spool price per kilogram. The second converts average power from watts to kilowatts, multiplies by print hours to give kilowatt-hours, then by the tariff per kWh. The third multiplies the same hours by your machine rate. Because hours appear in two terms, print time drives the answer as much as filament does. Electricity is usually the smallest piece: at 120 W and $0.18 per kWh an hour of printing costs about 2.2 cents, so the machine rate and the spool price normally decide the result. The page lists material and electricity on their own lines; the machine charge is whatever is left when you subtract those two from the total.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]U.S. Department of Energy. Energy Saver current 2026. Household energy guidance. Retrieved 2026-08-06.
2. [2]National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST SI Guide, 2008 edition. Appendix B unit relationships. Retrieved 2026-08-06.
3. [3]OpenStax, Rice University. University Physics, 2016. Volume 1 mechanics and Volume 2 thermodynamics. Retrieved 2026-08-06.