How much should you charge for a 3D print?
Short answer: the price of a 3D print is built by adding six things: material, electricity, machine wear, labor, failed prints and profit. In Argentina, PLA filament costs today between ARS 15,000 and ARS 30,000 per kilo depending on quality, and that is only the first of the six costs. Charging for material alone is the most expensive mistake you can make.
If you want the number without reading the whole thing, work it out here — it is free and no sign-up is needed.
The price is not the filament
Almost everyone starting out prices like this: weigh the part, multiply by what the spool cost, add a bit and done.
With that math you are working for free. Worse: you are paying to work, because the machine wears out and the electricity comes out of your pocket.
An 86 gram PLA part, with a spool at ARS 15,000 per kilo, has ARS 1,290 of material. If that print took 5 hours and 20 minutes, the fair final price lands around ARS 12,450. The gap between those two numbers is not "profit": it is everything the first calculation forgets.
The six costs that make up the price
1. Material
The easiest one, and the only one almost everyone counts.
In Argentina today, PLA runs from ARS 15,000 to ARS 30,000 per kilo depending on quality, and specialty filaments go well above that. PETG sits in a similar range. The difference between a cheap spool and a good one is not fussiness: a bad spool makes prints fail, and a failed print costs far more than the price difference.
Watch out for supports and purge. If your slicer says 86 grams for the part but you used 12 on supports, you spent 98. Charge for 98.
2. Electricity
A printer does not draw much per hour, but prints run long.
Take the rate from your own bill, which changes with where you live and your category. If you have several machines running in parallel all day, this number stops being a detail.
3. Machine wear
This is the one nobody sees and the one that hurts most when it arrives.
Your printer is not forever: fans, nozzles, belts, the bed, the extruder. All of it gets replaced. If your printer cost X and will last Y working hours, every print hour has to give you back a slice of that X, plus the year’s maintenance.
If you do not charge for this, the day something breaks you pay for it yourself. And it feels like "I made nothing this month" — but really you made nothing any month, it just showed up now.
4. Your time
Preparing the file, slicing, calibrating, removing the part, cleaning supports, sanding, painting, packing. The printer does none of that on its own.
Set what your hour is worth and count the real minutes of human work, before and after the print. It is the most underestimated cost, especially when post-processing is long.
5. The prints that fail
They fail. To everyone. And the one that fails also burned material, electricity and machine hours.
If 1 out of every 10 prints goes wrong, you have to spread that cost across the 9 that came out fine. You do it by adding a failure rate to the total cost. That is not pessimism, it is accounting.
6. The profit
Only here, on top of all of the above, comes your profit. Everything before this is cost: recovering it is not earning, it is breaking even.
The percentage is not a fixed number: it depends on the part and on what the client is asking for. A simple, repeat part is not priced like one you have to design, calibrate and test three times.
The mistakes that keep repeating
- Charging for material only. The mother of all the others.
- Not counting electricity because "it is tiny". Tiny per hour, big per month.
- Not counting machine wear until something breaks.
- Giving the design away. If you modelled the part, that is a separate job from printing it, and it gets charged separately.
- Not counting failed prints, as if they never happened.
- Forgetting the marketplace fees. If you sell through a marketplace, the fee comes out of your profit, not out of thin air.
- Charging by the gram. Two parts of the same weight can take very different times depending on infill and layer height. Weight alone is not enough.
How to work it out without doing the math by hand
All of this is already solved in the Printika Tools calculator: you enter the spool price, the weight, the time, your electricity rate and your printer details, and it gives you the final price in pesos, dollars or euros. It is free and you do not need to sign up.
If you also want to save quotes, keep your clients and control your spool stock, that lives in the platform.
Frequently asked questions
How much does 3D printing cost in Argentina?
It depends on the weight of the part and the print time, but material is only one piece: you have to add electricity, machine wear, your time, failed prints and profit. An 86 gram part that takes a bit over 5 hours lands around ARS 12,450 with PLA at ARS 15,000 per kilo.
How much does a kilo of PLA filament cost?
In Argentina it runs from ARS 15,000 to ARS 30,000 depending on quality, and specialty materials cost considerably more. PETG sits in a similar range.
Do you charge by the gram or by the hour?
Neither one on its own. Weight sets the material and time sets the electricity and machine wear. Charging by the gram alone leaves out slow prints, and charging by the hour alone leaves out heavy parts.
Should the design be charged separately?
Yes. Modelling is a different job from printing, with its own time and its own rate.
Work out the price of your next print
Free, no sign-up, in pesos, dollars or euros.