Most people arriving at a 3D printing quote have already done a rough sum in their head: filament is about £14.00 a kilogram, the part weighs 48 g, so it ought to cost a pound. That sum is correct and irrelevant, because material is roughly 8 per cent of what a small job actually costs to produce. This guide walks the whole stack, with our real numbers, so you can see what you are buying and where the levers are.
Key takeaways
- On a single small part, labour is around 84 per cent of the cost and filament is around 8 per cent.
- Handling is charged per plate, not per part, because a whole plate comes off the machine at once.
- That is why batches are cheap: the same part costs £30.00 on its own and £3.07 each in a run of fifty: about 90 per cent less.
- No job is priced below the minimum order of £30, because setup, slicing and handling cost the same on a four-gram part as on a four-hundred-gram one.
- We are not VAT registered, so the quoted figure is the figure on the invoice.
The five things you are paying for
Every printed part carries five costs: the plastic, the electricity, the wear on the machine, the consumables, and the time a person spends on the job. Four of those are small and predictable. The fifth is the one that decides your invoice.
On top of that sit two adjustments that are not costs in the accounting sense but belong in an honest price: an allowance for prints that fail, and the margin the business runs on. Both are published rather than buried, and the whole model is set out on the pricing page.
Filament: the line everyone overestimates
PLA Basic is £14.00 per kilogram here. Our example part is a 90 × 60 × 40 mm bracket weighing 48 g once printed, so the material in it is worth about £0.69, and that already includes the 4 per cent we add for purge, prime line and skirt, which is real plastic that leaves the nozzle and never becomes part of your order.
This is why moving from PLA to PETG, or even to a carbon-filled grade, changes a small quote far less than people expect. The material decision should be made on where the part lives, not on price. The reasoning is set out in PLA against PETG.
Electricity: smaller than you think
A part this size lands on the Bambu Lab A1, which draws about 95 watts while printing, plus a short burst at roughly 300 watts while the bed and hotend come up to temperature. At 24.89p per kilowatt-hour, the 1 h 10 m print in our example costs about £0.03 to run.
That figure surprises people in both directions. It is far more than a laptop and far less than a kettle left on. It is also the reason nobody should choose a bureau on electricity efficiency: at this scale it is noise.
Machine time and wear
A printer is a consumable with a long life. The Bambu Lab A1 costs £339.00 and we amortise it over 3,500 printing hours, which is £0.10 an hour. On top of that goes £0.05 an hour for nozzles, belts, build plates and lubricant. Our 1 h 10 m part therefore carries about £0.17 of machine cost.
This line is why print time matters more than part size. A tall, hollow part that takes six hours costs more in machine time than a squat solid one that takes two, whatever they weigh, and layer height is the single biggest lever on it. Halving the layer height roughly doubles the time.
Labour: the line that dominates
Hands-on time is charged at £24.00 an hour, and on a small job it is most of the price. Three things eat it.
First, every job carries about 10 minutes of setup: opening the file, checking wall thickness and overhangs, choosing an orientation, slicing, and raising the paperwork. That happens once whether you order one part or two hundred.
Second, each plate needs handling: loading, starting, removing, clearing and wiping down. Third, each individual piece gets a short inspection and, where you have asked for a standard finish, a brief clean-up of seams and support scars.
Add those together for a single part and you get around 18 min, or £7.32, roughly 84 per cent of the whole build-up. That is not a mark-up. It is somebody at a bench.
Why handling is charged per plate
This is the most important thing on the page for anyone ordering in quantity. You do not pull parts off a printer one at a time. You pull a whole plate off at once, and clearing a plate of twenty takes barely longer than clearing a plate of one.
So handling is costed per plate, not per part. Our example bracket has a 54 cm² footprint, which fits 8 to a plate once spacing is allowed for. A run of fifty is therefore 7 plates, 7 lots of handling, not fifty. The per-piece allowance that remains covers inspection and finishing, which genuinely does scale with the number of pieces.
Charging handling per part instead, which many quoting models do, is what makes small-batch printing look uncompetitive against tooling. It is an artefact of the pricing, not of the process.
Failure allowance and margin
Prints fail. A plate lifts, a spool tangles, a support fails and takes an overhang with it. We add 6 per cent across filament, energy and machine time to cover reprints, rather than sending you an apology and a bill. Consumables: plate wear, adhesive, isopropyl, packaging: add £0.10 a part and £0.35 a job.
Margin is 35 per cent of the subtotal. It is stated openly because a business buyer is going to assume there is one anyway, and a supplier that pretends otherwise is hiding it somewhere less obvious.
| Cost line | One part | Fifty parts |
|---|---|---|
| Filament | £0.69 | £34.69 |
| Electricity | £0.03 | £1.57 |
| Machine wear | £0.17 | £8.56 |
| Consumables | £0.45 | £5.35 |
| Failure allowance | £0.05 | £2.69 |
| Plates handled | 1 | 7 |
| Labour | £7.32 | £66.80 |
| Subtotal | £8.71 | £119.66 |
| Margin at 35% | £3.05 | £41.88 |
| Batch multiplier | × 1.00 | × 0.95 |
| Price | £30.00 | £153.50 |
| Per unit, average | £30.00 | £3.07 |
A worked example: one part against fifty
Read the table above from the bottom up and the whole argument for batch printing is there. One bracket costs £30.00. Fifty of the same bracket cost £3.07 each: about 90 per cent less per piece, and the total for the run is £153.50.
Almost none of that saving comes from filament, which scales exactly with quantity and cannot be discounted. It comes from spreading one setup across fifty pieces, from handling 7 plates instead of fifty, and from the batch tier, which reaches 0.93 at 200 units and upwards.
The same arithmetic explains the floor. No job is priced below £30, because a four-gram part and a four-hundred-gram part cost the same to check, orient, slice, handle and invoice. If your part is tiny, the honest advice is to order more of them.
What actually brings a quote down
Order in quantity. This is the big one, and the tiers step at 10, 25, 50, 200 units.
Increase the layer height. Going from a fine layer to a standard one can take a third off the print time, and on anything functional you will not notice the difference. Reduce infill: beyond about 20 per cent, extra infill adds time and mass without adding useful strength, because stiffness comes from the perimeters.
Design supports out rather than paying to remove them: chamfers instead of overhangs, teardrop holes instead of round ones, a deliberate split instead of a tall unsupported feature. The design guide covers all of that. Take the finish off if you do not need it, and do not pay a rush surcharge to fix a planning gap.
When printing is the wrong answer
Past roughly five hundred units of a stable design, injection moulding is cheaper and we will say so rather than quote you. A mould is a four-figure commitment before the first part exists, but it amortises fast at volume, and printing never gets cheaper per piece beyond the top batch tier.
Printing is also the wrong answer where a precision fit matters, typical FDM tolerance is around ±0.3 mm, and for anything food-contact, medical or safety-critical, none of which we take on. Those limits are set out in full on the capabilities page.
One closing note on tax. We are not VAT registered, so there is no VAT to add and none to reclaim: the quoted figure is the figure on the invoice. Everything on this page is an estimate until the file is actually sliced, at which point the print time is known rather than modelled, and if that moves the price materially, we tell you before we start rather than after.