The classic craft-fair failure: pricing prints at "filament cost × 2" and working all month for minimum wage. The honest pricing stack starts below the filament line and ends above your hourly rate — here is the full ledger.
The ledger
| Layer | Typical share | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Filament | 40–60% of material cost | grams × price-per-gram |
| Electricity | 5–10% | hours × 0.1 kWh × rate |
| Failure margin | 10–15% | your tracked failure ÷ success rate |
| Consumables | 5–10% | nozzles, belts, bed sheets amortized |
| Post-processing labor | often the largest | support removal, sanding, painting — hours × rate |
The ×3 floor
True cost × 3 is the craft-market floor: one third materials, one third your labor and skill, one third the margin that funds the next machine. Below ×3 you are subsidizing customers with your savings account — a hobby, not a business, which is fine if named honestly.
Where the money actually is
- Post-processing is the product: a raw FDM print sells as a prototype; a sanded, primed, painted one sells as a gift. The labor layer is where margin lives.
- Niche beats volume: replacement parts, hobby-specific bits, and customized names price at value, not cost.
- Batch efficiency: printing eight items per bed divides the warm-up and failure risk — the true-cost calculator applied per-item, per-batch.
- Track failures honestly: a month of logs turns the failure margin from a guess into a number — usually sobering, always useful.
Run your next product through the cost calculator, add the labor line, apply the floor — and the hobby starts paying for the hobby.