3D Print Cost Calculator

In short The cost of a print is mostly filament, and the arithmetic is grams divided by a thousand times the price per kilogram. Electricity is usually a small fraction of it: a printer drawing about 100 W for ten hours uses one kilowatt-hour, which at typical domestic rates is a fraction of the filament cost for the same print. Printers also draw far less than their rated power supply once the bed is up to temperature, so a plug-in meter gives a much better figure than the label. The term almost everyone leaves out is failures, and it is the one that changes the answer most. A failed print costs its full filament and its full time, so if one print in three fails, the successful ones have to carry that cost. The arithmetic is division, not addition: at a 50% failure rate the true cost per good print DOUBLES, it does not go up by half. That distinction is easy to get wrong and it matters as soon as you are pricing work rather than counting hobby spending. What is deliberately not in here is your time, printer depreciation, nozzles, build plates, and post-processing. For a print you are making for yourself those genuinely do not matter. For anything you are charging for they matter far more than the electricity, and a price built only from filament and power will not cover the machine that made it.