People remember the printer’s street price and forget the cost of a finished part. A simple spreadsheet will not make you a contract manufacturer, but it will stop a “cheap” hobby from surprising you after a month of failed skirts and over-dried assumptions.
I have not run a production cost study on these machines. The model below uses inputs you can fill from a slicer estimate, a receipt, and your electricity tariff—not invented shop rates.
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One row per job, not one number for the hobby
I would give each print a row and keep the columns boring.
Filament mass comes from the slicer, including brim, supports, and purge if you use a multi-material system. Convert grams to cost with the price you actually paid per kilogram for that spool, not a generic “filament is cheap” average. Track failed prints as their own rows. A 15% fail rate is a cost, not a moral failing.
Electricity is an estimate, not a lab measurement. A conservative way is to use the manufacturer’s rated power as a ceiling, then apply a utilization factor because a printer does not pull nameplate watts for every second of a PLA job. QIDI lists the Q2 at 350 W plus 280 W for chamber heating. If you run an actively heated chamber for ABS or ASA, that second number belongs in the model; if you print PLA with chamber heat off, it should not silently inflate every row. Multiply estimated average watts by print hours and by your local price per kilowatt-hour. Leave a cell for the tariff so you can change it later.
Time is optional money, but it is not optional information. Include slicing, drying, bed cleaning, and restarting failed jobs if you want the spreadsheet to match real life. If you value an hour of your evening at anything above zero, long failed prints get expensive quickly.
Consumables and wear can be a simple monthly average: nozzles, build-surface sheets, cleaning supplies, and the occasional cutter or feed-path part. Do not pretend these are zero because they are small on day one.
What the sheet is for
The point is comparison. A PETG bracket that succeeds on the first try can be cheaper than an ASA housing that needed enclosure preheat, ventilation time, and two restarts—even if the ASA spool was not much more expensive. The sheet also makes hardware trade-offs clearer. A machine with official material ratings and chamber control may reduce failed ABS jobs; it will not make electricity or filament free.
When you are ready to compare enclosed options as part of that cost picture, I use this framework: QIDI vs Bambu vs Creality: compare enclosed printers.
QIDI’s official store, if you want current enclosed model sheets to pull rated power and volumes from, is here: qidi3d.com.
A starter sheet can live in any spreadsheet tool. Put units in the header row (grams, currency per kilogram, watts, hours, currency/kWh) so you do not mix a 1 kg spool price with a 250 g sample later. Keep a second tab for printer constants, such as rated power copied from a manufacturer sheet, and reference those cells from each job row.
I would also add a “notes” column for the material and whether chamber heat was on, because otherwise PETG and ASA jobs get averaged into a meaningless unit cost. If you sell parts, separate hobby reprints from customer jobs so you do not price a bracket on a lucky first attempt. Update filament prices when you buy a new spool; old receipts quietly make the sheet too optimistic.
Keep the formulas visible and the inputs honest. A spreadsheet that hides fail rates is just a more confident guess.
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