How Much Does 3D Printing Cost?

A Worked Example: the 60 x 40 x 30mm Test Part

Our print time answer page works out that a 60 × 40 × 30mm part at 0.2mm layers uses about 28.5g of PLA and takes roughly 2 hours. Pricing that same part end to end: filament at a typical £20/kg spool is 28.5g × £0.02/g = £0.57. Electricity for a mid-range printer (50W hot end and electronics, 120W bed running about 85% of the print) works out to 0.1kWh from the hot end plus 0.204kWh from the bed, 0.304kWh total, and at 26.11p/kWh that is £0.08. Machine wear at a mid-range £0.25/hour for 2 hours adds £0.50. Add the three together and the part costs about £1.15, roughly half of it filament, just under half machine wear, and about 7% electricity. Run the same sum on your own weight, time and prices with the Print Cost Calculator.

Filament: Usually the Biggest Line Item

Cost per gram is simply spool price ÷ spool weight. Budget PLA runs about 1.5-2p per gram (£15-20/kg), mid-range PLA 2-3p per gram, and premium brands such as Prusament around 3-4p per gram (£30-40/kg), the same figures our Filament Cost Calculator FAQ gives. Take a classic 20g calibration boat (a "benchy"): at a typical £20/kg spool that is 20g × £0.02/g = £0.40 in filament alone, or roughly 30p on budget filament up to 80p on premium filament, before any electricity or machine time is added. Add 5-15% to any of these figures if you want to cover the material lost to failed prints and purge lines, which the calculator's fail-rate and purge-waste fields do automatically.

Electricity: Usually the Smallest Line Item

Energy used = wattage × hours ÷ 1000, then multiplied by your tariff. A typical desktop FDM printer draws about 40-60W for the hot end, motors and board, plus a further 80-200W for a heated bed that only runs for part of the print (our calculator defaults to 85%). At the current Ofgem price cap of 26.11p/kWh (1 July to 30 September 2026, standard variable tariff, Direct Debit), a 2-4 hour print typically costs about 5p to 25p in electricity depending on printer size and bed duty cycle, well under the filament cost on most prints. The cap changes every quarter, so the Electricity Cost Calculator lets you enter your own current rate.

Machine Wear and Depreciation

A printer is not free to run even once it is paid for: nozzles wear, belts stretch, and bearings and PTFE tube need replacing over its life. The simplest way to price this in is to divide the printer's purchase price by its expected lifespan in hours, for example a £300 printer good for 3,000 hours works out to about 10p/hour, then add a little for consumables. Our Print Cost Calculator offers ready-made bands of £0.10/hour (budget printer) up to £1.00/hour (professional machine), which is where the £0.10-£1.00/hour range in the table above comes from. If you are weighing up whether to buy a printer at all, or how many prints it takes to earn one back, the Printer ROI Calculator handles that separately using monthly running costs rather than a per-hour wear rate, so the two figures are not meant to be added together.

What UK Commercial Print Services Charge

Sending a job to a print-on-demand or prototyping service costs considerably more than printing it yourself, because you are also paying for someone else's time, equipment, quality control and profit margin, not just plastic. UK guides published in 2026 put small FDM parts from around £5 and medium prototypes (roughly 50cm³) at £15-£50, with production runs of 10 or more identical parts bringing the per-part price down to about £3-£25 through economies of scale (2026 UK estimate). Other UK pricing pages quote a narrower £4-£20 per simple FDM print but add a flat £30-£90 minimum order or setup charge that applies regardless of how small the part is, which is in the same range as the £30+VAT minimum order some specialist UK print bureaux publish on their own pricing pages (2026 UK estimate; figures vary by provider, material and finish, so always get a live quote). Resin/SLA parts and industrial processes such as SLS typically cost more again for the same volume.

The gap is mostly labour and margin, not materials. Our own Order Pricing Calculator FAQ notes that hobbyist sellers commonly mark up 50-100% over their full cost (material, electricity, wear, labour and a failure buffer), while professional print services typically mark up 100-300% to cover overheads, customer support and business costs. Apply even a 100% markup to the worked £1.15 example above and you land at £2.30, still well below the £4 to £5 floors commercial services publish: the gap is their overheads, minimum order fees and labour, which is exactly why home printing undercuts buying single small parts.

Resin Printing Costs More Per Part

The same three-part breakdown applies to resin, but the numbers shift: standard resin costs about 2-4p per ml (£20-40/litre) and premium resins (tough, flexible, castable) 4-8p per ml, roughly 2-4 times FDM filament by volume, though resin printers typically draw less power (30-60W versus 150-300W for FDM) per our Resin Cost Calculator FAQ. If you print miniatures, our resin-per-bottle answer covers how many models you get from a typical bottle.