Cost per plate: formula and real 3D print example

The true cost of a 3D printed plate is filament, power, machine wear and labour, divided by the share of plates that succeed. On our real 205 g plate, at researched Swiss prices, that gives CHF 14.76, while the filament alone is CHF 3.90.

The grams and print times come from our real slicer projects, and the starting time is what we measured. Every other input is a market value we researched in October 2026, not a figure from our own books. The table says how solid each one is, because some are far firmer than others. Replace them with your own when you have them.

The formula

Cost per good plate = (M + E + D + L) / (1 - f)

M  Filament      grams / 1000 x price per kg
E  Power         print hours x average kW x price per kWh
D  Machine       print hours x (purchase + spares - resale) / lifetime hours
L  Labour        hands-on minutes / 60 x hourly rate
f  Failure rate  failed plates / all plates started, as a decimal

Dividing by (1 - f) spreads the failed plates over the good ones. It slightly overstates the cost, because many prints fail before they use all their filament and time. That errs on the safe side. Use it until your log shows how far your failed plates get.

The worked example

The plate is one of our real ones: a complete V3 motorcycle licence plate holder, four parts on one plate, sliced for a P1S. We price every plate on this page in PLA, so the plates compare.

Now the calculation:

At these values the filament is about 26% of the true cost, and labour is about 60%.

Other real plates, same prices

These use the same values and the same 12 minutes of labour. Only the grams, the times and the part counts are ours.

The table shows something a filament calculator cannot. The brake line holder uses about 3% of the holder's filament, but costs more than half as much per plate, because the hands-on time stays the same. Labour is per plate, so filling the plate is the biggest lever you have. Fourteen caps on one plate bring each one down to CHF 0.72.

The brake line holder is sliced for a different printer, so in practice it needs its own machine figures.

How we got each value

Filament. CHF 19 is one spool of Bambu PLA Basic at 3DJake on 31 October 2026, including VAT. A refill costs CHF 16.15, and 3DJake takes 20% off at four spools or more, so a farm buying in bulk pays about CHF 15. Bambu ASA is CHF 23.50. Use the plate total from your slicer, not the weight of the finished part, because support, brims and colour changes are paid for too.

Power. Bambu's rated figure of about 1,000 W is a heating peak, not an average, and using it would overstate this line tenfold. Owners who measured whole prints with a meter report 84-96 W on a P1S, mostly in PETG and including a dryer and idle time, and 87 W on an X1C in PLA. We use 100 W. We found no whole-print measurement of a P1S in ASA, where the hotter bed draws more, so measure that with a plug-in meter. The price is ElCom's 2026 median for a small business, 26.3 Rp. per kWh. A household pays 27.7 Rp., and the 2027 median falls to 25.9 Rp. Power is the smallest line either way.

Machine. The CHF 446 is well below 3DJake's list price of CHF 949, so it may not last. At list price this plate's machine line would rise by about CHF 0.93. For life we use 5,000 hours because it is the cautious end of what we found, and no manufacturer publishes a figure. Prusa's staff decline to give one. Multiply the hours you expect per year by the years you expect to keep the machine, and use that if it is lower.

Labour rate. The Federal Statistical Office's 2024 median for simple production work (ISCO 93) is CHF 5,541 a month, which already includes a share of the 13th salary. That is CHF 66,492 a year. Adding 15% for employer costs, typically 10-20%, gives CHF 76,466. Dividing by 1,808 productive hours, which is 2,080 less holidays, public holidays and sickness, gives CHF 42 an hour. The 15% and the hours are our assumptions. Your own time costs money too, even if nobody pays you for it.

Hands-on time. Time it, because we found no real time study. It took us about 45 minutes every morning to start prints on seven printers, or about 6.4 minutes per printer. The other 5.6 minutes for clearing and checking is assumed. One farm's story on Printago's site reports eight hours a day for eight printers, which suggests at most 12-20 minutes per plate for all tasks, depending on how many plates a day you assume.

Failure rate. The published figures are weak and mostly from vendors. Prusa reported over 93% success in a 2019 test of 478 multi-material prints on 20 printers. SimplyPrint plans with about 10%. A 2016 University of Texas study weighed failed prints at 19% of the ABS used in a student workshop. We use 5% because a farm repeats proven files, and 10% is the safer figure for new or customer files. Count your own from a log, per printer and material, over several weeks.

What moves the number

Here is the same licence plate holder, changing one input at a time:

This is why we would time labour before haggling over filament.

What this formula leaves out

Rent, shipping, packaging, payment fees, design time, software and tax are not in it. Nor is idle time: if your printers stand still half the week, your machine costs per print hour are higher than this suggests. Add them to your price calculation separately. The formula gives you the cost of a plate, not a selling price.

About these numbers

Our project files are saved without slicing results, so we sliced them on 30 October 2026 using each file's saved settings: Bambu Studio 02.08.02.61 for the P1S plates and Anycubic Slicer Next 2.0.0.5 for the brake line holder. The grams and times are therefore slicer predictions, not weighed plates or stopwatch times. A plate laid out differently will give different numbers. Shop prices include Swiss VAT and were read on 31 October 2026. If you can reclaim VAT, your costs are about 7.5% lower on those lines.

The labour share is also why starting prints is part of what running a farm really means. We also build Rackrew, software for running a print farm.