A print's real cost is more than the spool price
It is tempting to price a print from filament weight alone, but electricity, machine time, and your own labor are real costs even when they are easy to ignore because no invoice arrives for them separately. A print that ties up a machine for six hours has an opportunity cost even if the filament itself is cheap, and repeated failed prints are a real cost that a single successful print's material total does not reflect. This estimator keeps every component visible and separately editable, instead of collapsing everything into a single guessed number.
How the total is built
Material cost comes from mass and price per kilogram. Energy cost comes from your average power draw, print time, and electricity rate; if you have a wall-meter reading for your printer and material, use it here instead of a guess, since this is often the least accurate line item otherwise. Labor cost comes from the minutes you actually spend preparing, monitoring, and post-processing the print, at your own hourly rate. A flat overhead line covers machine wear, consumables, and facility costs that are hard to attribute per print. A failure allowance percentage is applied to the subtotal last, reflecting that not every print in a batch succeeds.
Worked example
45 g of filament at $22/kg ($0.99), a 4-hour print at 120 W and $0.16/kWh ($0.077), 15 minutes of labor at $20/hour ($5.00), and $1.50 flat overhead sum to a $7.57 subtotal; a 10% failure allowance ($0.76) brings the total to about $8.33, with every component shown separately rather than folded into one number.
Limitations
This estimate totals exactly the values you enter; it has no way to know your printer's actual power draw, your true failure rate, or hidden costs like a filament that clogs mid-print. Treat unmeasured inputs as editable planning assumptions, and revisit them periodically against your real experience. This is a cost estimate, not a price; the Quote Price Planner adds margin and risk allowance on top of this total for a customer-facing quote.