How to price failed prints, supports and filament waste
Account for material waste and unsuccessful batches without counting the same loss twice.
A profitable print shop needs successful orders to recover the cost of unsuccessful attempts. It also needs to distinguish a normal material allowance from a failed production batch. 3D PrintMargin provides a separate input for each.
Material waste is part of a successful job
Supports, brims and multi-colour purge can consume filament even when the product comes out perfectly. Use the slicer’s complete material estimate when available. Add an extra waste percentage only for consumption missing from that estimate, such as purge during setup. Do not add a support allowance again if supports are already in your weight.
A failure reserve spreads losses over successes
The calculator models the failure rate as the share of attempted batches that fail. It assumes each failed attempt consumes a complete batch’s filament, electricity and machine time. It divides those production costs by the success rate.
If a batch has $9 of production costs and 10% of attempts fail, adjusted production cost is $9 ÷ 0.90 = $10. The $1 difference is the reserve. Simply adding 10% would produce $9.90, which understates this full-loss model.
Measure your own pattern of failures
Keep a record of attempts, acceptable output and the material and time lost. Ten failures among 100 comparable attempts is a 10% attempted-batch failure rate. Separate different materials and models if they behave differently. A single troublesome design should not necessarily dictate the reserve for every product you sell.
The full-loss assumption can overstate losses when prints fail early. It can also be a poor fit when only one item on a plate fails. For partial losses, use your records to set an equivalent allowance, or calculate those losses separately and avoid applying an additional reserve to the same costs.
Know what this reserve excludes
3D PrintMargin applies its reserve to material, power and machine wear. It does not repeat the entered labour for each failed attempt. Add expected cleanup and restart work to batch labour if those tasks are significant. Profit per printer-hour uses expected production time including full failed attempts; this keeps the capacity estimate consistent with the reserve.
Reducing failures can improve both unit cost and available capacity. Recalculate after a process improvement using measured results rather than setting the failure rate to zero because the last print succeeded.
Run the numbers for your own print
Use your actual costs and batch size to calculate a price and profit estimate.
Open the free calculator