3D printer hourly rate calculator
What an hour of your printer costs you once its purchase price, its servicing and its electricity are spread across the hours it will actually run. This is the machine cost per hour the other calculators ask you for.
Printing hours over its whole life, not hours owned.
Nozzles, belts, plates, the yearly strip-down.
A worked example
The figures the calculator opens on, worked by hand: a printer that cost $900, expected to print for 8000 h and run 1500 h a year, drawing 120 W on a tariff of 0.18 $/kWh, with $120 a year of maintenance.
- Wearing out: $900 ÷ 8000 h = $0.1125 an hour.
- Electricity: 120 W ÷ 1000 × 0.18 $/kWh = $0.0216 an hour.
- Maintenance: $120 ÷ 1500 h = $0.08 an hour.
- Together: $0.1125 + $0.0216 + $0.08 = $0.2141, the $0.214 in the calculator.
All in, per printing hour
The machine is not all an hour of printing costs. Take the job the 3D print cost calculator opens on, 5.5 h on the printer, and divide it by those hours. These are its demo figures, not a market rate:
- It costs you $13.80 ÷ 5.5 h = $2.51 per printing hour, with the machine at the $0.30 / h that calculator opens on; your own rate from above goes in its place.
- Charged at $30.36, it brings in $30.36 ÷ 5.5 h = $5.52 per printing hour.
The machine is one line of what a print costs. The 3D print cost calculator takes this as its machine cost per hour and adds the filament, your own hours and your margin, and LayerFlow3D keeps a rate like this on every printer and costs each order against the machine that made it.
What each number means
Machine cost per hour
The result: what an hour of printing on this machine costs you under the figures above. It is the purchase price spread over its printing life, the electricity it draws while printing, and a year of maintenance spread over the hours it runs. Nothing else is in it.
What the printer cost
The machine, plus anything it needed to work: an enclosure, a better build plate, the upgrade you did in month two.
Hours you expect from it
Printing hours over its whole life, not hours owned. A hobby-grade machine run hard is a few thousand; a well-maintained one far more. Guess low and the rate is conservative, which is the safer way to be wrong.
Maintenance a year
Nozzles, belts, plates, the yearly strip-down. The costs that arrive whether or not the machine earned anything that month.
Hours you run it a year
What turns a yearly servicing bill into a per-hour one. A printer that runs 200 hours a year carries the same bill as one that runs 3,000 - which is why a busy machine is cheaper per hour, not more expensive.
Power draw while printing
Average while running, not the peak on the label. Most desktop machines sit far below their rating once the bed is up to temperature.
Electricity
What you pay per kilowatt-hour. If you print overnight on a cheaper tariff, use that rate.
Guides that use this calculator
Setting up a Bambu print farm, Developer Mode included
How to run several Bambu Lab printers as a farm: network mode, what Developer Mode is for, and what you give up either way.
Read it →Starting a 3D print farm: the first ten decisions
The ten choices that are expensive to reverse later, from what you print to how you know whether the month made money.
Read it →Questions people ask
What is a 3D printer hourly rate?
What one hour of running that machine costs you, before any material or your own time. It is the purchase price wearing out, the electricity it draws, and the servicing it needs, divided across the hours it will actually print.
How long does a 3D printer last?
In printing hours rather than years, which is the number that matters here. A few thousand hours is a fair conservative figure for a desktop machine; a well-maintained one with parts replaced as they wear goes much further.
Should I include maintenance in the hourly rate?
Yes. Nozzles, belts and plates are a real cost of running the machine, and folding them into one rate is simpler than tracking them per job. That is why this calculator asks for them and the ones that price a print do not.
Does a busier printer cost less per hour?
Per hour, yes - the same yearly servicing bill and the same purchase price are spread across more printing. That is one of the strongest arguments for keeping a machine loaded.
Is this the hourly rate to charge customers?
No. It is what the machine costs you, and a price has to cover more than the machine: filament, your hands-on time, failed prints, the costs no single job carries, such as rent and software, and a profit on top. How much more is your decision; this calculator does not make it for you.
What do I do with this number?
Put it into the print cost calculator as machine cost per hour, or set it on the printer inside LayerFlow3D and every order it makes is costed against it automatically.
Set it once, and every order uses it
LayerFlow3D keeps a rate per printer and costs every job against the machine that made it, so a print on the expensive machine is priced like one.