3D Print Cost & Filament Log Starter

The filament is the smallest line

"It's just three dollars of filament" is how print shops lose money. A print's true cost is six lines — the material, the electricity, the printer wearing out underneath the job, a buffer for the prints that fail, your post-processing time, and the packaging — and the filament is usually the smallest of them. This starter walks you through all six for one print, with a fully worked example, so the next quote you give is a price that actually pays you.

The line almost nobody's spreadsheet has is the machine itself. Every print-hour wears the nozzles, the belts, and the build surface, and one day the printer is worn enough to replace. A machine rate — depreciation plus a maintenance allowance, per print-hour — collects for that a few cents at a time, from the prints that caused it.

Weigh, subtract, never run dry

A spool looks half-full right up until a 14-hour print runs dry at 2 a.m. Remaining filament is one subtraction: the spool's weight on a kitchen scale, minus what the empty spool weighs (manufacturers often list it — or weigh one of your own empties once per brand). The printable spool log keeps the number where you can see it, with a reorder column so a replacement arrives before the shelf is empty.

A shop reference, not certification

Every figure in the worked example is illustrative — your material prices, power draw, printer lifetime, and labor rate are yours to enter. There is no standard published lifetime for hobby and prosumer printers, so the worksheet treats lifetime as a planning assumption you set conservatively and revisit. The pricing multiples are a method, not financial advice. And one honest note unique to this craft: many downloadable models are licensed for personal use only — selling prints of someone else's model requires a license that allows it, and checking is your responsibility.

Is this really free?

Yes — the starter is a free PDF download with no email required. It is the lite cut of the paid 3D-Printing Shop's Filament & Print-Cost Workbook, which adds a working Excel print-cost calculator, printer profiles with computed machine rates, a gram-level filament & resin inventory with a REORDER flag, a print job queue, a failed-print log with an 11-mode troubleshooting guide, a maintenance log, and a per-model pricing catalog.

What exactly is in the free starter?

A two-step fill-in worksheet — your printer's machine rate (depreciation + maintenance per print-hour), then the true cost of one print (material, electricity, machine rate, a failed-print buffer, labor, packaging) with a worked example — plus a print-and-use filament spool log.

Does it work for resin printers?

Yes — the cost method is the same (resin by the gram instead of filament), the machine-rate math applies to any printer, and the spool log works for bottles by weight too. The full workbook covers resin explicitly, including resin-specific failure modes.

Where do the numbers in the example come from?

They are illustrative placeholders chosen to show the method — a $22/kg spool, a 120 W average draw, a $600 printer with an assumed 4,000-hour life. Your own numbers go in the blanks; the worked example is not a benchmark.

Does it expire or is it tied to a year?

It never expires. The cost model is evergreen, and the spool log uses columns you fill in yourself.