Instant quote
Price a part in seconds. See every line of it.
Load an STL or 3MF and this page measures it in your browser, works out the plastic and the machine time, and prices the job the way we actually cost it: including how many of your part fit on one plate, which is what makes a batch of fifty cheap. Every part is printed at our own workshop in Folkestone, for businesses across Kent and posted UK-wide. No account, no callback, and the file stays on your computer.
Your file is read in this browser. Nothing is uploaded to us unless you attach it to an order.
Before you send a file
What we take, what we hold, and where your design goes
- Formats we price here
- STL, ASCII or binary, and 3MF straight out of Fusion, SolidWorks, Onshape or Blender. Up to 60 MB.
- Formats we price by hand
- STEP, IGES, OBJ, SketchUp and a dimensioned PDF drawing. Email those over and we quote them the same working day.
- Where your file goes
- Nowhere. The mesh is read and measured by your own browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and no copy reaches us unless you attach it to an order.
- Confidentiality
- Client work is not shown, shared or posted. If your business needs an NDA in place first, say so and we will sign one.
Capability at a glance
- Tolerance
- Typically ±0.3 mm on FDM. Good enough for brackets, jigs, housings and fit checks; not a substitute for machined parts on a press fit.
- Build volume
- 256 × 256 × 256 mm on the largest machine. Anything over 256 mm is split and bonded, or redesigned to come apart. We will tell you which before you order.
- Lead times
- Standard 5–7 working days. Express 2–3 working days. Next day subject to the queue.
- Batch limits
- Ten to a few hundred is where FDM earns its keep. Past about 500 units injection moulding is cheaper, and we will say so rather than take the order.
- What we will not take on
- Nothing food-safe, medical, certified or safety-critical. No load-bearing structural parts where a failure hurts someone.
- Invoicing
- Invoiced on completion, £30 minimum order, no VAT to add. Business accounts can be set up on terms after the first job.
No model to send
Most businesses that ring us have a broken part, a sketch on a drawing, or a measurement written on the back of a job sheet. We draw it from that at £42.00 an hour, quote the hours before we start, and you keep the CAD file at the end of it.
Every figure on this page comes from the same engine we quote from, see the full pricing model or what the workshop can and cannot do.
- Machine
- Bambu Lab A1
- Build
- 256 × 256 × 256 mm
- Nozzle
- 0.4 mm
- Flow
- 12 mm³/s
- Enclosure
- No
Infill
15%How much plastic goes inside the shell.
The usual choice. Handles being carried, mounted and used indoors.
Supports
Needed for overhangs past about 45°. They add roughly 12% more plastic and leave marks we clean up at the finishing stage.
Quantity
Order 10 or more and another 2% comes off. The set-up and the slicing are the same work whether we print one or fifty.
Scale
Load a file and you can rescale it here, either by percentage or to a target height.
STL files carry no units. If your part comes in far too small or far too large, this is why.
Not sure which of these to pick? Leave them as they are and put a note on the enquiry. We will tell you what we would print it in and why, before anything goes on a plate.
Instant estimate
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Load an STL or 3MF and the price appears here, itemised down to the electricity. Nothing is uploaded to us while you do it.
No file yet? Describe the part instead and we will quote it by email, usually the same working day.
Nothing hidden
Why a batch of fifty is not fifty times the price of one
Most printing services quote a single number and leave you to guess at it. We would rather show the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the argument for using us on a repeat part.
A printed part is mostly time, not plastic. On a small job the filament is often under a pound. What costs money is a person: checking the file, orienting it, slicing it, loading the plate, taking it off, and invoicing you. That work happens once per job and once per plate, not once per part. If forty of your brackets fit on one plate, forty brackets take one set-up and one plate change, and the price per bracket collapses.
This is also why a tall part costs more than a wide one of the same volume: layer count drives machine time. And why the £30 minimum exists: every job carries the same set-up whether it is one clip or a hundred.
The figure on this page is an estimate from a volumetric model, not a slicer run. It is usually within a few percent. We confirm it once the file is sliced, and if it comes out higher we tell you before anything is printed.
Before you send a file
The questions we get asked most
STL and 3MF go straight into the instant estimate, in both ASCII and binary form, up to 60 MB. 3MF is the better of the two if your CAD offers it, because it records the units in the file and cannot arrive at a hundredth of the intended size.
STEP, IGES, OBJ, native SolidWorks, Fusion 360 and SketchUp files, and dimensioned PDF or DXF drawings all come by email and are quoted by hand, usually the same working day. STEP is the format to send if we may need to modify the geometry.
If you have no file at all, that is fine too. Photographs next to a steel rule, a dimensioned sketch, or the broken original in the post are all enough to start from.
No. The estimator opens and measures your file entirely inside your browser, using your own computer's processor. Nothing is sent to us and nothing is stored on a server, so you can price a confidential or unreleased design without it leaving your machine.
Your file only travels at the point you choose to attach it to an order or an enquiry. If you close the tab before then, no copy exists anywhere but on your own device.
Almost always. It is modelled from your geometry rather than sliced from your file, which is why we call it an estimate rather than a quotation.
Before anything is printed we slice the file properly and confirm. If the real figure is lower, you pay the lower one. If unusual geometry, heavy support requirements or very thin walls push it materially higher, you are told why before we start and you are free to walk away.
The minimum order value is £30. There is no minimum quantity: one part is a perfectly normal order, and plenty of our work is exactly that.
The floor exists because a job costs roughly the same amount of a person's attention whether it produces one part or five: opening the file, checking wall thicknesses and overhangs, choosing an orientation, slicing, loading the plate, inspecting the result and raising the invoice. Below £30 we would be paying to take the work, and a low minimum mostly generates enquiries that consume a working day and return four pounds.
256 × 256 × 256 mm in a single piece, which is the build envelope of every machine in the workshop: roughly the size of a football.
Larger parts are split and bonded. We choose a seam that suits the geometry, add locating pins so the sections align without a jig, and put the joint where it will not be looked at. Bonded PETG and ABS joints are close to parent-material strength.
If your file is too large for one plate, the estimator tells you the exact percentage you would need to scale it down by, so you can decide between scaling and splitting.
The estimator checks your bounding box against the envelope in all six orientations, allowing 4 mm of clearance on every axis, and tells you immediately if it will not go.
You then have two choices. Scale it down, and the tool shows the exact percentage needed. Or let us split it: send the file over and we will propose a seam, quote the sections and print them with locating pins so they align when they are bonded.
For a functional part, splitting is almost always the better answer. Scaling changes every clearance, every wall thickness and every hole in the model at once.
Still stuck? Email hello@pixelcraftedprints.co.uk with whatever you have: a drawing, a photo of the broken part, or the measurements written down is enough to get a price back.