How to Price 3D Printing Services: A Complete Guide for Print Shops

Ask five print shops to quote the same STL and you will get five prices, sometimes a factor of three apart. That is not because four of them are wrong. It is because most of them are guessing.

Pricing by gut feel works until it doesn't. You win the jobs you should have declined and lose the ones that would have paid properly. This guide builds a price from the ground up: the full cost stack, a margin formula, and one part priced end to end in pounds.

Most pricing guides are written for hobbyists selling the odd print. This one is for people running a service with rent, wages and a VAT return.

1. Price From the Full Cost Stack

Underpricing almost never comes from choosing too small a margin. It comes from missing costs entirely. Here is what a part actually costs you.

Material, including the material you throw away

Current UK norms: PLA around £18–25/kg, PETG £20–28/kg, standard resin £30–60/L. Engineering materials run well above that.

But the grams in the sliced file are not the grams you pay for. Add supports, purge, brims and the unusable stub on every spool. Then add failures. Prints fail — layer shifts, adhesion, a clog at hour six — and pretending they don't just means your successful prints quietly subsidise the failed ones.

A failure buffer of 5–15% is normal. Tune it to your measured failure rate per material and per machine. If you don't know your failure rate, that is the first number worth tracking this month.

Machine time

The printer costs money whether or not you charge for it. A simple build-up for a £2,400 desktop FDM machine:

• Depreciation: three years of service at roughly 1,600 printing hours a year is 4,800 hours, so £0.50/hour.
• Electricity: around 150W averaged over a print is 0.15kWh per hour; at the UK's typical 25–30p/kWh, call it £0.04/hour.
• Maintenance and consumables: nozzles, belts, build sheets, the occasional hotend — roughly £0.46/hour over the machine's life.

That lands at £1.00/hour for a busy desktop FDM machine. Larger-format machines, resin with its handling and consumables, or SLS sit anywhere from £2 to £5/hour. Prusa's breakdown of real print costs is written for individual machines, but the method is sound and worth a read.

Labour, which everyone undercounts

Someone checks the file, repairs the mesh, slices it, preps the plate, pulls the part, picks out supports, finishes it, inspects it and packs it. None of that is free because you were "there anyway".

For a routine FDM job: 10 minutes of file review and slicing, 5 minutes of setup, 10 minutes of removal and support cleanup, 10 minutes of QC and packing. Thirty-five minutes. At a fully loaded £18/hour, that is £10.50 — frequently more than the material.

Packaging and overhead

A box, void fill and a label runs £1–2 per shipment. Overhead — rent, insurance, software, marketing, the accountant — has to land on jobs somehow. Total it monthly, divide by expected jobs, and add it as a flat per-order amount, or fold it into your hourly rates. Just don't leave it out.

2. The Formula (and the Markup Mistake)

Once you know the cost, the price is one line:

Price = Cost ÷ (1 − target margin)

Want a 40% margin on a £25 part? £25 ÷ 0.6 = £41.67.

The common error is adding 40% instead. £25 × 1.4 = £35, which is only a 28.6% margin. Markup and margin are not the same thing, and confusing them leaks money on every single order.

As for the target: 30–50% is a workable band for custom FDM work, with high-touch or urgent jobs at the top of it. Below 25%, one failed batch or one awkward customer wipes out the week.

3. A Worked Example: 120g PETG Bracket, 7-Hour Print

A customer uploads a bracket. It slices to 120g of PETG and 7 hours of print time. Priced honestly:

• Material: 120g part plus 10g of supports and purge = 130g. PETG at £24/kg is 2.4p per gram, so £3.12.
• Machine time: 7 hours at £1.00/hour = £7.00.
• Failure buffer: 10% of material plus machine time, because a failed print burns both = £1.01.
• Labour: 35 minutes across slicing, setup, support removal, QC and packing at £18/hour = £10.50.
• Packaging: £1.50.
• Overhead allocation: £2.00.

Total cost: £25.13.

At a 40% target margin: £25.13 ÷ 0.6 = £41.88. Call it £42.

Now compare that with the per-gram rate plenty of shops would apply. At 15p per gram — which sounds healthy — this bracket goes out at £18. That is £7 below cost. The machine runs for seven hours, a person handles the job for half an hour, and you pay for the privilege.

4. Small Parts Break Per-Gram Pricing

The bracket understates the problem. It gets worse as parts get smaller.

An 8g fiddly part costs about 19p in PETG, but it still needs the file checked, the plate set, the supports picked out, the part inspected and posted. Twenty-five minutes of touch time does not shrink because the part did.

This is why a minimum order price is not optional. £15–30 is the normal range for UK service work. Below your minimum you are not selling prints; you are buying admin.

Per-gram and per-hour rates are fine as components of a price. As the whole price, they systematically undercharge small complex parts and overcharge large simple ones — and the market will cheerfully send you all of the former and none of the latter.

5. Quantity Breaks That Don't Give the Margin Away

Ten copies of a part genuinely cost less per unit than one: one file review, one setup, packed plates, one parcel. Pass some of that saving on and you win production runs instead of one-offs.

The clean structure is price brackets: 1–4 units at full price, 5–9 at 10% off, 10–24 at 15%, and so on. Two rules keep it safe. Discount only the costs that actually shrink — labour and setup, not material. And never let the deepest bracket drift below marginal cost, because at volume a small pricing error becomes a large invoice with your name on it.

If you quote through your website, set the brackets once as policy rather than haggling by email. RapidQuote3D includes a bracket generator for exactly this — the guide to pricing brackets and bulk pricing walks through it.

6. Reprice on a Schedule, Not a Mood

Costs move. Filament prices track the exchange rate, the energy price cap resets every quarter, and wages only go one way.

So review the whole model quarterly, and reprice a material immediately when its landed cost moves more than about 10%. If your rates live in a quoting system, that is a two-minute edit — see adding and managing materials — not an afternoon in old spreadsheets.

Each month, compare estimated cost against actual on a few finished jobs. Persistent drift between the two is your model telling you where it is wrong.

And stop copying competitor prices. You do not know their costs, their volumes, or whether they are even profitable — plenty are not. Copying an unprofitable shop's price list with great accuracy is not a strategy.

7. You Do Not Have to Be the Cheapest

Somebody with a farm of unattended printers in a garage will always undercut you. Let them.

Compete on what a business buyer actually pays for: turnaround they can plan around, engineering materials the garage cannot run, finishing that lets the part go straight onto the machine, QC that means they never open a box of scrap. All of those are priceable. "Cheapest" is not a position; it is an auction.

Your price list should express the position. If you are the 48-hour shop, a rush premium is not gouging. It is the product.

Put the Calculation Somewhere It Cannot Drift

A pricing model is only useful if it is applied the same way on a wet Friday afternoon as on a fresh Monday morning. Quotes worked out by hand drift with workload and mood — the same part gets three different prices in a month, and customers notice.

The fix is to move the model into an instant quote widget on your site. Geometry-based quoting prices an uploaded STL, OBJ, 3MF or STEP file from its actual volume and dimensions, applies your per-material rates and infill options, enforces your minimum order and runs your brackets — identically, every time. RapidQuote3D does all of this for a flat £299/month with a 14-day trial (pricing here), and there is more on the workflow in how to automate 3D printing quotes.

But do the work in order. Build the cost stack, pick a margin, sanity-check it against the bracket example above. Automation makes a pricing model consistent. It cannot make a bad one profitable.