3D printing cost data: electricity, materials and failure rates

1. What one 100 g PLA part costs in electricity, by country

The part is fixed so the countries are comparable: 100 g of PLA at 1.24 g/cm³ is 80.6 cm³ of solid material, which takes 4.77 hours on the site’s slicer model. Multiply the printer’s average draw by those hours by the household rate and you have the electricity line — the whole table, one formula.

Formula: cost = (watts ÷ 1000) × hours × USD per kWh. Electricity pricing checked 2026-10-23; household rates come from the national sources listed in §4, not from a global price index. The mid and high-end columns are identical because Bambu Lab publishes the same 105 W PLA average for both the P1S and the X1C — their real difference is in the machine-hour rate, not the wall socket.

The whole spread is 5.2×: the same part costs $0.0476 in Ontario and $0.2472 in Germany, where industrial electricity is not the variable — household tariffs are. On this part, electricity is 6.1% of the subtotal in the United States and 12.8% in Germany (see §3 for the full bill). Anyone quoting “electricity is negligible” is right in Canada and wrong in Germany, and both statements come from the same formula.

2. Material cost per cubic centimetre, 11 FDM filaments

The number to compare across materials is cost per cm³ of solid volume, because that is what a slicer gives you: density converts volume to grams, and the retail price converts grams to dollars. Prices are 1 kg spool listings scraped on 2026-10-23; bulk 5–10 kg spools are excluded, so this is what a small shop actually pays, not the best case.

Price basis: us.elegoo.com, overture3d.com, bambulab-us.myshopify.com, printedsolid.com (brand stores and US distributors). Amazon listings could not be scraped — the storefront refuses automated requests — so they are absent rather than approximated. Density is the manufacturer’s technical data sheet value (ISO 1183) for every material in this table; the per-row link is the sheet we read.

The cheapest material per cm³ is PLA at $0.0186 and the dearest is PVA (water-soluble support) at $0.0508 — a 2.7× spread across the same eleven-filament market. That is smaller than most people expect: a part that costs $1.50 in PLA costs $4.10 in PVA, and the gap between PLA and PETG, the two materials beginners argue about most, is 1.37×. Swapping material is a real decision, but it is rarely the decision that moves a quote.

3. What a failure rate actually adds to a quote

A failed print is not a cost you absorb once; it is a multiplier on every attempt. If f of your prints fail you must print 1 ÷ (1 − f) units to deliver one, so the cost per delivered unit is the per-attempt cost divided by (1 − f) — not multiplied by (1 + f). The difference sounds small and compounds fast.

Failure rates are an estimate, not a measurement: they come from a 2019 Filamentive survey of more than 200 users and from self-reported threads in r/3Dprinting, which is a self-selected sample. The dataset stores them with an estimate flag for exactly this reason. Treat the bands as a warning about direction and magnitude, not as a benchmark you can cite as fact.

At the bottom of the beginner band the multiplier is 1.1111; at the top it is 1.4286. A shop that quotes from a 2% assumption and actually runs at 20% loses 22.5% of every quote it wins — the loss is invisible in the invoice, which is why it survives for years. This is the single row we would add to any cost calculator that omits it, and the reason the calculators on this site carry it as a line instead of a footnote.

4. Sources and method

Four kinds of number sit on this page and they do not carry equal weight. Each is labelled where it is used.

Measured or manufacturer-published printer draw

• Creality Ender 3 / Ender 3 V2: 125 W average while printing PLA, 277 W peak/rated — 3dsolved.com
• Bambu Lab P1S: 105 W average while printing PLA, 140 W for ABS, 1000 W peak/rated — wiki.bambulab.com
• Bambu Lab X1 Carbon: 105 W average while printing PLA, 150 W for ABS, 1000 W peak/rated — wiki.bambulab.com
• Bambu Lab A1 mini: 80 W average while printing PLA, 150 W peak/rated — wiki.bambulab.com
• ELEGOO Saturn 4 Ultra: 144 W rated maximum only; no measured average is published — printer-hub.com

Household electricity prices

Retail price to the household, including tax and grid fees where the source includes them. Converted to USD at ECB reference rates of 2026-10-22 (GBP 1.3376, EUR 1.1205, AUD 0.7012, CAD 0.7126 to the dollar).

• US: 18.31 c/kWh (2026-07), $0.1831 per kWh — www.eia.gov
• UK: 26.32 p/kWh (2026-Q4), $0.3521 per kWh — www.ofgem.gov.uk
• DE: 37.0 ct/kWh (2026-YTD), $0.4146 per kWh — bdew.de
• AU: 33.1364 c/kWh (2026-07), $0.2323 per kWh — www.originenergy.com.au
• CA: 11.2 c/kWh (2026-11), $0.0798 per kWh — nugget.ca

Filament density

Manufacturer technical data sheets, not reseller listings, for all eleven materials:

• PLA — Bambu Lab TDS
• PLA+ — Prusament TDS
• PETG — Prusament TDS
• ABS — Bambu Lab TDS
• ASA — Prusament TDS
• TPU 95A — Bambu Lab TDS
• Nylon (PA) — eSUN TDS
• Polycarbonate (PC) — Bambu Lab TDS
• PVA (water-soluble support) — Bambu Lab TDS
• Wood-filled PLA — Bambu Lab TDS
• Carbon-fibre PLA (PLA-CF) — Bambu Lab TDS

Retail prices

Scraped 2026-10-23 from us.elegoo.com, overture3d.com, bambulab-us.myshopify.com, printedsolid.com. Low and high are the cheapest and dearest 1 kg SKU in that sample; mid is the median of the sample, which for two-SKU materials falls on a real listing rather than an average of two. Bulk spools, refill packs without a spool, and multi-colour bundles were excluded because they are not what a shop buys for a single job.

Estimates, labelled as estimates

Machine-hour rates and failure rates are modelled, not measured. Machine time is purchase price divided by an assumed service life plus 10% of the purchase price for maintenance; on the entry tier that is $0.0384/h. Failure rates come from the survey evidence described in §3. Both appear as separate lines in every calculator on this site so they can be overridden, and neither is presented as a statistic.

What is not available

These were looked for and not found, so they are absent from the tables rather than estimated:

• Amazon listings — the storefront blocks automated requests, so no price was captured.
• Measured print draw for a resin printer — only the 144 W rated maximum is published.
• Idle draw for the Ender 3 series — no citable measurement exists.
• Low and high price bands for PVA and nylon — only a single 1 kg SKU was on sale.

5. Use the data

If you want these numbers applied to your own part instead of the 100 g example, the 3D printing cost calculator runs the same parameter set with your grams, hours, failure rate and margin. For material-only comparisons, the filament cost calculator converts spool price to cost per gram and per cm³. And if the question is what to charge rather than what it costs, the pricing guide works through the labour line that this page deliberately leaves out — electricity and filament are the small half of a quote.

Frequently asked questions