DEV Community: Polyform Prints

How much should I charge for 3D prints? A complete pricing breakdown for Etsy sellers

Polyform Prints — Sun, 31 May 2026 12:58:27 +0000

If you've ever finished a print, looked at it, and just picked a number, you're not alone. Most new Etsy sellers price by gut feel. It feels close enough. Until you do the maths properly and realise you've been working for free, or even at a loss.

This guide walks through every cost that goes into a 3D printed item, with a real worked example, so you can price with confidence instead of guesswork.

What actually goes into the cost?

There are more cost factors than most sellers account for. Here's the full list:

1. Filament (material cost)

This is the obvious one. But most sellers estimate it wrong. You need to know your filament price per kilogram and the exact weight of the print, not a rough guess.

PETG typically runs around £13-15/kg. If your print uses 45g of filament:

45 / 1000 × £14 = £0.63 in filament

2. Electricity

Your printer draws power for every hour it runs. A typical FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling, the most common type of filament printer) uses around 0.1-0.2 kWh per hour. With UK electricity at roughly £0.29/kWh:

1.75 hours × 0.15 kWh × £0.29 = £0.11 in electricity

Small, but it adds up across hundreds of prints.

3. Failure rate

Prints fail. Filament snaps, beds unlevel, power cuts happen. If 1 in 10 prints fails, that failed print cost you material and time. Build that into your price.

A 10% failure rate adds roughly 10% to your base material cost. Don't ignore it.

4. Packaging

Bubble wrap, poly bags, tissue paper, boxes. It all costs something. Even £0.15-0.30 per order adds up fast if you're not accounting for it.

5. Platform fees

Etsy charges a listing fee, a transaction fee, and a payment processing fee. On a £7.99 sale that's roughly £0.65 in fees before you've made a penny of profit. If you're not factoring this in, your actual margin is much lower than you think.

6. Printer depreciation

Your printer cost money. Every hour it runs, it's wearing down. A simple way to handle this: divide the printer cost by its expected print hours. A £350 printer running 7,000 hours over its life costs about £0.05/hour to run. Small, but real.

A real example: Micro SD Card Case

Let me walk through the actual costs for one of my own Etsy listings, a PETG micro SD card case with a magnetic closure using 4 embedded neodymium magnets.

Cost item	Amount
Filament (44.97g PETG @ £14/kg)	£0.66
Electricity (1.75hrs @ 0.15kWh, £0.29/kWh)	£0.11
Neodymium magnets (4x) + packaging	£0.30
Failure rate buffer (5%)	included
Printer depreciation (£0.05/hr)	£0.09
Total base cost	£1.16
Etsy fees (transaction, listing, payment processing)	£0.65
Total cost per sale	£1.81

At a 130% markup the recommended price is £2.66 before postage. The listing is priced at £7.99 with free UK delivery baked in (Royal Mail Tracked 48 at £2.85). That leaves roughly £3.13 profit per unit after all costs and postage.

If I'd priced by gut feel at £4.99, after postage and Etsy fees I'd be making around £0.33 per sale. Barely worth printing.

What markup should you use?

There's no universal answer, but here's a starting framework:

100% markup doubles your base cost. Minimum viable for a hobby seller with low volume.
120-150% accounts for your time, covers surprises, and leaves real profit. Good starting point for most Etsy sellers.
200%+ is justified for complex, unique, or high-demand items where you have no direct competition.

Check what similar items sell for on Etsy. If the market won't support your price at a healthy markup, that's a signal the product needs rethinking, not that you should accept lower margins.

Doing this without a spreadsheet every time

Manually calculating all of this for every listing gets old fast. I built PolyQuote, a free API that does all of this in a single call. You give it your filament type, weight, print time, and markup, and it returns a full cost breakdown with a recommended sale price in GBP, USD, and EUR.

There's a free tier with 200 calculations per month, more than enough to price every listing before you publish it. No credit card required, just an email address.

You can try it at api.polyformprints.co.uk

If you use Google Sheets to manage your listings, there's also a one-formula integration that pulls live pricing directly into your spreadsheet, no code required. That's covered here.

TL;DR

Price by gut feel and you'll undercharge. Every time.
Material, electricity, failure rate, packaging, platform fees, and depreciation all count.
Work out your base cost first, then apply a markup that reflects your time and leaves real profit.
Check the market, but don't race to the bottom. Cheap rarely wins on Etsy.

How to get live 3D print pricing in Google Sheets with one formula

Polyform Prints — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:02:54 +0000

If you sell 3D printed items on Etsy (or anywhere else), you've probably done the maths in your head or in a scrappy spreadsheet. Filament cost, electricity, time, markup - it adds up, and getting it wrong means you're working for free.

I built PolyQuote to solve this - a REST API that calculates an accurate recommended sale price from your print parameters. And recently I added a CSV endpoint so you can pull live pricing directly into Google Sheets with a single formula. No scripts, no code, no setup.

Here's how to do it.

The formula

Paste this into any cell in Google Sheets:

=IMPORTDATA("https://3d-print-quote-api.polyform-api.workers.dev/demo/quote/csv?filament_type=PETG&weight_grams=85&print_hours=3.5&markup_percent=120")

Click "Allow access" if Sheets prompts you, and you'll get this:

Row 1 is headers. Row 2 is your live pricing data - material cost, electricity cost, total base cost, and recommended sale price, all calculated from the parameters you passed in.

What the parameters mean

Parameter	What it is
`filament_type`	PLA, PETG, ABS, TPU, PLA+, PLA-SILK, PLA-MATTE, PETG-MATTE
`weight_grams`	How much filament your slicer says the print uses
`print_hours`	Total print time in hours
`markup_percent`	Your profit margin - 100 means double your cost

So the formula above is asking: what should I charge for a PETG print that uses 85g of filament and takes 3.5 hours, with a 120% markup?

The answer comes back as £3.06.

Making it dynamic

The real power is linking the parameters to cells instead of hardcoding them. Set up a simple input table:

A	B
Filament type	PETG
Weight (g)	85
Print hours	3.5
Markup %	120

Then build the formula dynamically:

=IMPORTDATA(
  "https://3d-print-quote-api.polyform-api.workers.dev/demo/quote/csv"
  &"?filament_type=" & B1
  &"&weight_grams=" & B2
  &"&print_hours=" & B3
  &"&markup_percent=" & B4
)

Change any input cell and the pricing updates automatically. Price a whole catalogue of prints by copying the formula down with different parameters per row.

What the API calculates

The response breaks down:

material_cost_gbp - filament weight × cost per kg (system defaults or your own)
electricity_cost_gbp - print time × printer wattage × your electricity rate
total_base_cost_gbp - everything combined before markup
recommended_price_gbp - base cost with your markup applied

The full API (with an API key) also supports failure rate buffer, packaging cost, printer depreciation, and platform fee breakdowns for Etsy, eBay, and Shopify. The demo endpoint keeps it simple - the four core parameters that cover most use cases.

Limits on the demo endpoint

The demo endpoint allows 5 requests per hour per IP - enough for testing and light use. For production use (pricing a full catalogue, running a batch script, or building a tool for other sellers), sign up for a free API key at api.polyformprints.co.uk. The free tier gives you 200 calls/month, no credit card required.

Why I built this

I run a small 3D printing business on Etsy - Polyform Prints - and kept pricing by gut feel. At the end of the month I'd realise I'd undercharged on half my listings.

PolyQuote started as a personal tool and I opened it up as a public API when I realised the problem wasn't unique to me. The Sheets integration came next because most small sellers live in spreadsheets, not terminal windows.

If you sell prints and want accurate pricing without building anything yourself, give it a try.

API landing page: api.polyformprints.co.uk

Docs: api.polyformprints.co.uk/docs.html

Postman collection: Run in Postman

I built a 3D print pricing API on Cloudflare Workers — here's why and how

Polyform Prints — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:33:32 +0000

I've been trying to start a small 3D printing business on Etsy, and kept running into the same problem: pricing by gut feel.

You finish a print, look at it, and pick a number that "feels right." Then at the end of the month you realise you've been working for free.

So I built PolyQuote — a REST API that calculates a recommended sale price from filament type, weight, print time, and markup. It handles material cost, electricity, failure rate buffer, packaging costs, and platform fees for Etsy, eBay, and Shopify. Responses come back in GBP, USD, and EUR.

The stack:

Cloudflare Workers (compute)
Cloudflare KV (API key storage, rate limiting, filament defaults)
Stripe (subscription billing)
Resend (transactional email)
Deployed via Wrangler

A few things I learned:

Cloudflare Workers are genuinely impressive for this use case — cold starts are essentially zero, global distribution is free, and KV is good enough for simple key-value storage at this scale. The free tier gets you surprisingly far.

Currency conversion was originally hardcoded (embarrassing in retrospect). I swapped it out for live rates from the Frankfurter API, cached at the edge for an hour. One fetch call, Cloudflare handles the caching.

Rate limiting without a database is simpler than I expected — just KV keys with TTLs. Not bulletproof at high scale but fine for where I am now.

What's live:

Free tier: 200 calls/month, no credit card
Maker: £5/month, 5,000 calls
Pro: £15/month, 25,000 calls
Public demo with no signup required

If you sell 3D prints or build tools for people who do, I'd genuinely love feedback. The Postman collection is public if you want to poke around without signing up.

Landing page: api.polyformprints.co.uk

**Postman: **https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/54931854/2sBXqRjwqj