Guide

How to quote a 3D printing job accurately

Most shops quote from a per-gram rate and a gut feeling about how long the printer will be busy. That works until it doesn't — usually on the jobs you were most pleased to win. Here is the method that holds up, line by line.

The five lines every quote needs

A quote that survives contact with reality has five components. Miss one and you are not pricing, you are guessing with extra steps:

1. Material actually consumed — including what the printer throws away.
2. Machine time — costed, not just noted.
3. Failure rate — the jobs that don't come off the bed.
4. Labour — yours, at a real rate.
5. Margin — applied last, to the total.

The order matters. Margin applied to material cost alone is the single most common way a shop ends up working for nothing.

1. Material actually consumed

The number you want is not the model's volume. It is what the spool loses, which is larger and sometimes much larger:

• The part itself — walls, infill, top and bottom layers.
• Support material, which on an awkward part can approach the mass of the part.
• Brim, raft and skirt.
• Purge and priming — small on a single-material print, substantial on a multi-material one where every tool change purges.

Your slicer already knows all of this. It is the number on the slice summary, not one you should be deriving from the STL's volume. If you are quoting from volume × density × rate, you are systematically under-quoting every part that needs support, and over-quoting every part that is mostly sparse infill.

Then cost it from what you actually pay per kilogram, landed — including shipping and tax on the spool, not the sticker price on a listing.

2. Machine time

Machine time is not free just because the printer is already paid for. Give every machine an hourly rate that covers:

• Depreciation — purchase price spread over the hours you realistically expect from it before it is replaced or relegated.
• Power — measurable, and usually smaller than people assume.
• Consumables — nozzles, belts, build plates, PTFE, bed adhesive.
• Maintenance time, which is labour you spend on the machine rather than on a job.

Divide the annual total by the hours the machine will actually run, not by 8,760. A machine that prints twenty hours a week has a much higher real hourly cost than one that runs continuously, and quoting both at the same rate means the quiet machine is subsidised by the busy one.

The print time itself comes from the slicer. It is an estimate, but it is a far better estimate than a human one — and it is the number that changes most between machines, which is the point of the next page in this series.

3. Failure rate

Some jobs fail. If your quotes don't carry that cost, your successful jobs are paying for your failed ones out of margin you thought you had.

Track your own rate for a month — failed prints as a share of started prints — and apply it as a multiplier on material and machine time. A shop failing one print in twenty needs roughly 5% on those two lines just to break even against reprints.

Track it per material rather than as one number. The rate on a well-tuned PLA profile and the rate on a first attempt at a large ABS part are not the same problem, and averaging them means the PLA work subsidises the ABS work.

4. Labour, the line everyone forgets

This is where hand-quoting leaks the most money, because the work does not feel like work. Every job consumes:

• Reading the enquiry and replying to it.
• Opening the file, checking it is printable, orienting it, slicing it.
• Writing the quote, and the follow-up when you hear nothing.
• Starting the job, watching the first layer.
• Removing supports, cleaning up, checking dimensions.
• Packing, labelling, arranging collection or dispatch.

Time yourself once, honestly, across a handful of jobs. Most shops discover the pre-print half alone is fifteen to forty minutes — on a job whose print cost might be a couple of hundred rupees. At any sensible hourly rate, that is the largest line in a small quote, and it is the one almost nobody bills.

5. Margin

Apply margin to the total of the four lines above, not to material alone. A shop that marks material up 300% and treats machine time and labour as overhead has priced a large fast job well and a small fiddly job disastrously.

Margin is also where your judgement legitimately enters: rush jobs, unusually tight tolerances, a customer who will need three revisions, work you want because it leads somewhere. Keep that judgement in one line where you can see it, rather than smeared invisibly across a per-gram rate.

Four mistakes that quietly lose money

Quoting from model volume instead of the slice

Volume ignores infill density, wall count, supports and purge. Two parts with identical volume can differ by a factor of three in material and time depending on geometry and settings. This is the big one.

Using one per-gram rate across every machine

Machines differ in speed, in how much they waste, and in what they cost per hour to own. A single rate means one of your machines is quoted wrong, and you cannot tell which.

Pricing quantity linearly

Ten parts is not ten times one part. Plate setup is amortised, several parts may print together in barely more time than one, and the labour per part collapses. Quoting 10 × unit price loses you bulk work you would have been glad to have — and quoting a flat discount without checking whether they actually fit on one plate loses money instead.

Not charging for the quote itself when it is bespoke

An instant, automatic quote should be free — it costs you nothing. But a job needing design work, a file repaired, or a long conversation about tolerances is consultancy, and treating it as free pre-sales effort is a decision worth making deliberately rather than by default.

A worked example

A bracket, PLA, 0.2 mm layers, 20% infill. The figures below are illustrative — use your own, because the entire argument of this page is that borrowed numbers are how shops end up wrong.

Line	Working	Amount
Material	48 g from the slice, at ₹1,200/kg landed	₹57.60
Machine time	3 h 10 m at ₹35/h	₹110.83
Failure allowance	5% on the two lines above	₹8.42
Labour	25 min at ₹300/h	₹125.00
Cost		₹301.85
Margin	40% on total cost	₹120.74
Quote		₹422.59

Note what happened: material is under a fifth of the final price. A shop quoting this job at "₹2 per gram" would have said ₹96 and lost ₹200 on a job it was pleased to win. That gap is the entire reason to quote from a method rather than a rate.

Doing this automatically

Every step above except labour and margin is mechanical, and every mechanical step is one your slicer already performs. The tedious part is that you must do it by hand, per enquiry, before you know whether the customer is serious.

That is the job 3Dash does: your customer uploads the model on your own website, it is sliced against your machine's real profile, and your rates and margins are applied to produce the number you would have produced by hand. You can drive the widget yourself without an account.

If you want to understand why the slicing part matters so much — and why a generic per-gram calculator cannot be made accurate — the next page measures it: slicer profile vs per-gram pricing.