The price of a failed print

Every workshop has failures, and almost no calculator counts them. The plastic, the hours and the electricity of a dead print do not disappear — they are paid for by the parts that survive.

The breakdown below carries a failure line for exactly that reason.

Filament usedgPart weight — supports and purge are added by the waste factorPrint timeh

Material

Printer

Sales channel

ElectricityUSDper kWhYour hour of workUSDZero means “I do not count my time”. A fair choice, but it is the most common reason a workshop runs at a loss without knowingConsumables per plateUSDAlcohol for washing, gloves, filters — spent per print, not per hour. Mostly a resin thing; on filament it is usually zero

Your selling priceUSDLeave empty to see the recommended one

Preparation, post-processing, hardware and packaging. Without them the cost treats your time as free

True cost

$2.38

everything included, per unit

Profit per unit

$1.61

Per machine-hour

$0.81/h

Your selling price

$3.99

Break-even

$2.38

Three price levels — tap to apply

Where the money goes

Filament$2.16

Wear & maintenance$0.16

Failed prints$0.04

Electricity$0.02

One sale pays for more than one attempt

If a share of prints dies, every sold part has to cover the attempts that did not make it. At a 4% failure rate you are printing about 1.04 attempts per sale — small, but not zero, and it grows sharply as the rate climbs.

How much a dead print costs depends on when it died. A print that fails on the first layer wastes almost nothing; one that fails at the last wastes everything. That is a single number in the app, and you can set it yourself.

The honest way to use it

Failure rate belongs to the printer, not to the part: it is a property of the machine and how you run it. Guessing it high makes every part look expensive; guessing it low is how a workshop discovers at the end of the year that it worked for free.