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What 3D printing actually costs per hour
Somewhere between "electricity is basically free" and "charge $20 an hour for machine time" lies the real number. For a consumer FDM printer in 2026 it is about $0.08–0.20 per print-hour, all-in. Here is the arithmetic.
The three per-hour costs
Depreciation. Your printer has a finite number of good print-hours before wear makes it uneconomic. Community consensus for consumer machines is 1,500–5,000 hours; well-maintained workhorses go longer. Divide purchase price by realistic lifetime hours:
| Printer | Price | Life estimate | Per hour |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bambu Lab A1 | $399 | 5,000 h | $0.08 |
| Bambu Lab P1S | $399 | 6,000 h | $0.07 |
| Bambu Lab X1 Carbon | $749 | 7,500 h | $0.10 |
| Prusa MK4S | $999 | 10,000 h | $0.10 |
| Creality K1C | $369 | 5,000 h | $0.07 |
Maintenance consumables. Nozzles, belts, PTFE tube, build surfaces, lubricant, the occasional fan. Per-component guides put desktop FDM at roughly $0.06–0.13 per print-hour; PLA-only printing on an open-frame machine sits near $0.03, while abrasive carbon-fiber filaments (hardened nozzles, faster hotend wear) push toward $0.15–0.20. A fair default is $0.07.
Electricity. The one everyone worries about and the smallest of the three. A typical printer averages 100–150 W while printing — heating spikes are brief. At the 2026 US average of $0.18/kWh, a 120 W machine costs about 2 cents per hour. Even at UK rates (~£0.26/kWh) it is roughly 3p/hour. Measured with a smart plug, four printers running a full month is typically under $10 of power.
Put together
A 6-hour print therefore carries about a dollar of machine cost. Real, worth pricing in, and roughly a hundred times smaller than the folklore number.
So where does "$20 per hour" come from?
From mixing up three different things: what the machine costs you (about $0.17/h), what your time is worth (a real $20–35/h, but only for the minutes you actually spend slicing, unloading and packing — not the hours the printer runs unattended), and what a print service charges (which bundles labor, overhead, failures, profit and the convenience premium). Quoting a customer $80 because a print ran overnight prices you out of every market; refusing to count the machine at all quietly eats your margin. Count each piece for what it is.
What failed prints do to these numbers
A failure consumes material, power and machine hours and produces nothing. At a typical 8% failure rate, every successful print carries about 9% extra machine-side cost. Dialed-in farms run 2–5%; a new printer or new material can run 15–25% for a while. It belongs in the price, not in the "bad luck" column.
Run your own numbers
The free calculator does this whole chain — your printer, your electricity rate by region, maintenance, failures, your time, then marketplace fees on top — and shows profit per print and per machine-hour:
Figures researched August 2026: EIA/Ofgem/Eurostat electricity averages; maintenance ranges from published per-component guides; lifetime bands from community consensus. Estimates, not accounting advice — every number is editable in the calculator.