What a resin print costs

Resin printing is priced in the wrong unit almost everywhere. Your slicer reports millilitres; the bottle is sold by weight. Skip that conversion and every print is under-costed by about a tenth before anything else goes wrong.

The calculator is set up for a small print: 30 ml on an Elegoo Mars 5, five hours, with wash supplies counted per print. Replace the numbers with yours.

Resin usedmlVolume as your slicer shows it — Chitubox and Lychee count millilitres, the bottle is sold by weightPrint 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

$3.27

everything included, per unit

Profit per unit

$2.22

Per machine-hour

$0.44/h

Your selling price

$5.49

Break-even

$3.27

Three price levels — tap to apply

Where the money goes

Consumables$1.20

Wear & maintenance$1.07

Resin$0.87

Failed prints$0.08

Electricity$0.05

Millilitres in, grams in the cost

Chitubox and Lychee both count volume, because volume is what a model gives you. Resin is bought by the kilogram. The bridge is density — about 1.1 g/ml for standard resin, and printed on the label of anything unusual.

Thirty millilitres is therefore roughly thirty-three grams. Type 30 into a calculator that thinks in grams and you pay for thirty, on this print and on every print you quote after it.

Wash supplies are not machine maintenance

Alcohol, gloves, paper, a filter: all of it is spent per print, not per hour. A one-hour print and a ten-hour print are washed the same way, so charging these by the hour is wrong for both.

On small parts this line regularly comes out larger than the resin. That is not a rounding detail — it is the difference between a part that pays for itself and one that quietly does not.

The machine wears faster than a filament one

The LCD is a consumable with a life measured in a couple of thousand hours, and the FEP film goes with it. Hourly wear on an MSLA machine runs two to three times that of a filament printer, and a larger share of prints fail. Both are already in the breakdown above.