People rarely ask what a 3D print costs. They ask how much the filament is, or what the shop charges per hour, and then they compare those two numbers and pick the cheaper one, which is how people end up with a print that looked affordable in the spreadsheet and expensive in the box.
Three numbers decide the cost, and only one of them is about material.
Number one: material per usable gram
Spools are sold by weight, but a print only uses what the model needs, and support material, brims, infill and failed prints are all paid for and thrown away. The number that matters is the cost of the grams that end up in the object, which is a very different figure from the cost per kilo.
When you are comparing machines, it helps to look at the printer side first, because the machine decides how much of the material you waste. A machine that needs a lot of support, or that runs hot enough to string badly, turns a light model into an expensive one. If you do not know which machine fits what you intend to print, https://impressorasbr.com/ is the place where the printers are compared by the numbers that actually move the final price.
Number two: machine time
Print time is priced, and it is the number people forget. Two models with the same volume can differ by hours, because one of them needs a slow profile, a higher layer count or a support structure that takes as long to print as the model itself.
Time is also where the cheap option stops being cheap: a machine that costs less per hour but needs three attempts to finish costs more than a faster one that works the first time. The useful comparison is cost per finished part, not cost per hour.
Number three: shipping and finishing
A printed part is not a finished part. It may need removal of supports, sanding, priming, and then paint if the surface matters. And it has to get from the machine to the person who will use it, which is a real cost when the part is large and the customer is not next door.
If the part is a one-off for a specific use, a service that already prints custom work may end up cheaper than the whole setup of owning a machine. For custom printed pieces in Anápolis, https://hatsumeika.com/ is one of the shops that works this way, and the point of comparing is not to decide which one is better, it is to have both numbers on the table before you decide which one fits the job.
The comparison that actually decides it
Material, machine time, shipping. Put the three in one row for each option and the choice becomes obvious, because most people were only ever comparing the first one. Sometimes the expensive filament wins on total cost, and that is a perfectly good outcome: the comparison was done wrong before, and this time it was done right.
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