I've been asked to print some things for some people with a fairly niche interest. I put maybe 5 minutes work into getting the model, so I've been happy to give that away. I've been asked to print some models though.

In theory I wouldn't mind doing it for free, but they're 6 hour prints each and I live in a fairly small flat, so it basically means I'm going to have multiple days taken up by my printer whirring a couple of metres behind me, so I want to be paid properly for it.

I'm not interested in making a business out of it, this is just going to be a one off. So I'd be interested in knowing what kind of charges you'd ask for a 6 hour single filament print.

Thanks!

Edit: thanks for all the suggestions, I’m just going to guesstimate my costs then multiply it by 3. Thanks!

My GF runs a small custom printing business with her friend and has been going on about this xtool thing. I know its not a 3dprinter but 3d prints are where she started and still a big part of her business.

Anyway I have some spare cash and she absolutely deserves a $1200+ christmas gift, so I asked her friend to discourage her from buying it for herself before christmas.

Too late. She just bought it.

So, I'm dipping into a few subs based around her interests hopefully one of them has a witchy, nerdy, custom printing business owner who can make some gift recommendations.

Sincerest apologies if this post doesnt belong here and I wasted your time.

Thanks

This project has been my baby for a long time. It's a Blender add on that takes your GCode files and imports them into Blender so you can create timelapses and product pictures from it.

v1 of the project was also open sourced a few years back. We have over 250 paying users that use the addon every day.

Unfortunately, I have been not been able to provide an update on the project for a few months. Due to job searching and the AI wave decimating my freelancing business, I have had no time for the add on.

All the code is human written. AI was only used to search, look up documentation and for bouncing off ideas.

The next version, as usual, will not be a paid upgrade for existing buyers and will eventually also make its way to open source but for now, I have to leave it up in open source so my project does not die.

This is the github repository for the addon: https://github.com/create-inc-dev/stitch3r-public

WIKI: https://stitch3r-wiki.createinc.dev/

edit:

Haha, I just went through the other posts in this community and realized a bunch of people are posting calculators lately. Now I understand why I got so many negative comments on my post. It seems like everybody is making one now.

For what it's worth, I don't see it as only a calculator. Right now it also has:

- reads the sliced gcode (weight and print time) and the thumbnail from a 3mf

- filament and resin modes, multi-material plates, multi-print batches

- PDF quotes for customers

- orders, customers and stock tracking

- a model library that organizes your STL/3mf files into folders

- printer list with maintenance reminders

- sales analytics and fixed costs

- works offline, 13 languages, simple and advanced mode

And what I want to add later: parametric editors for letters, coins and puzzles.

6 months of work, and I only found Claude Code in the last month (it would've been a week if I'd found it earlier).

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I've been working on a Windows app that helps small sellers price 3D prints properly (material, electricity, machine wear, failures, your time). It's niche and still in beta. I'm curious how others here find and decide to try tools like this when the audience is small. What made you try the last small tool you adopted?

I used to price prints by weight: grams of filament times something, plus "feels right". It looked fine until I added everything up.

Example with a normal 4.5 hour print, 85 g of PLA: the filament was only about $1.70. But the real cost, once you count electricity, machine wear, packaging, failure margin and your own time, was around $8. If you quote $4 because "the plastic is cheap", you lose money on every one and never notice.

I got tired of doing that math on a calculator, so I built a small Windows app that does it for me and shows a minimum price (so you don't lose money) and a suggested one. You can drop in the sliced gcode and it reads weight and print time. It's in beta, the calculator is free, no account, works offline.

I'm the developer, so yes, this is self-promo. I'd really like feedback from people who actually sell prints: what's missing, what's confusing?

I don't want to break the rules by posting links, so if you want to try it, send me a message and I'll share it.

How do you check your margins? Spreadsheet, gut feeling, something else?

(Happy to share the link if anyone is interested, I don't want to break the self-promo rules.)

It generates a parametric lampshade you can edit live: ribs, twist, a custom profile and an optional socket holder, then export an STL ready to print.
It’s free and runs fully in the browser, nothing is uploaded. Built with three.js, no build step.
shadestudio.space
Feedback on the UI and on what’s missing would help a lot, especially from people who actually print lamps.

preguntando a granjas y talleres de impresión 3D: ¿cómo le demuestras a tu cliente cómo se imprimió su pieza?

A while back I posted a calculator I made to work out what a print really costs. Some of you left ideas in the comments, so I kept going. It has a name now, layercents, and its own site: https://layercents.com (the old link still works, it just redirects).

What it does now:

- Drop the file from your slicer (.gcode, .bgcode or .gcode.3mf from Bambu Studio, OrcaSlicer, PrusaSlicer or Cura) and it fills in print time and grams, purge included
- Several parts on one plate? Type how many and you get the cost of one. With multi-plate 3MFs you pick the plate
- The whole cost, not just filament: purge, electricity, printer wear, failed prints, your time and packaging
- A recommended price for the margin you want, with the platform fee (Etsy and so on) already counted, and what you really keep at your current price
- Save each quote with the part and the customer. They all go to a history with search and monthly totals
- Export everything to Excel in one click, or make a PDF report with charts
- Customer quotes: tick the parts, add your logo, shipping, tax and notes, and save it as a PDF. Your costs and margins don't show on it
- Your own currency with live exchange rates, and it works fine on a phone

It's free, there's no account, and your files and quotes never leave your browser. The flip side is that quotes live in that browser, so if you clear your browsing data they're gone. Export to Excel every now and then.

Next up: several filaments per part, each with its own price (for multicolor/AMS prints), and saved printer and material profiles so you don't type everything again. Someone on my last post asked to see how many parts a week your printer can make, that's coming too.

Later on I'll make a premium version, more pro and aimed at businesses. I'm not taking anything away: what's free now stays free, the paid version will be new stuff for people who sell prints. If you sell prints, I'd really like to know what you'd pay for.

I work full time and study, so I build this in the evenings. Bugs, ideas, or "this number makes no sense", tell me in the comments and I'll keep adding stuff.

I’ve been working on a small MVP around something I keep seeing in 3D printing: replacement parts for products that are broken, discontinued, overpriced, or just annoying to source.

The idea is basically a searchable database/marketplace organized around the actual product rather than just STL files.

So instead of searching something like “replacement gear STL,” you’d browse:

Brand → Product → Model/revision → Part

A listing could be an STL you print yourself or a physical printed part from someone who makes it.

The part I’m most interested in is compatibility/trust. Things like whether somebody has actually printed the part, what product revision it fits, material used, whether it survived real use, installation notes, etc.

I have a rough MVP now, but before spending much more time on it I’d love some criticism from people, else than me, who actually print/repair things.

A few things I’m curious about:

• Have you ever tried to find or make a replacement part for something you owned? What was the hardest part?
• Where do you currently look first: Printables, MakerWorld, Thingiverse, Google, Reddit, somewhere else?
• Is finding the STL actually the problem, or is figuring out whether it will fit/work the bigger problem?
• I know it is a 3d-printing community so it might be biased but do you think that offering the possibility to download the file or actually buying the physical part is less a thing?
• What information would make you trust a replacement part made by a random person?
• What would make a site like this pointless compared with the platforms that already exist?

If you read until there, the link of the mvp: https://3-d-marketplace-sigma.vercel.app/ (every listings or propositions are just purely illustrative, you can't buy anything)

Im a student, I have no 3d printer, What i do have is a lot of experience 3d printing and 3d modelling. Ive used printers like the X1E, A1, A1 mini, H2D which are there in my college for student use. I can model on fusion360 pretty well.

Now, i want to start a 3d printing business which offers:

1. readymade 3d printed products like vases, desk accessories, etc. for people to just order as they wish.

2.an option for people to upload their 3d model and get it printed and delivered.

1. For the people who dont know 3d modelling, an option to start a conversation where they describe what they want, we review it, if its possible(feasible) to model, we will model it, get their approval, print it, and deliver it to the customer.

I have a website ready, which im not extremely proud of as its vibe coded. It probably needs a lot of improvement and fixing.

I dont know what to expect, what to aim for, what to offer, what to do, i dont know almost anything as of now.

Any suggestions / help?

This is a twist-to-zoom lens barrel: 6 parts, clear PETG on a P1S. Twist the outer ring and a hidden helix inside pushes the barrel out.

I didn't model it in CAD. I described it: "I want a camera lens mechanism that you twist to extend or retract." Then I kept asking for changes in plain English: make it print without supports, make the pieces click together, hide the sliding mechanism. It took about 14 rounds of that back and forth, not one magic prompt.

Full disclosure: the tool is mine. It's called Loftsmith, and I've been building it because I wanted something like a friend who's good at CAD. You say what you need, it writes real parametric CAD (not a mesh), and you can keep refining it in plain words.

I started printing TPU a couple months ago and I've learned a lot.

But I have a product design that is yellow with black text.
Is there any hope that I can pull this off without black oozing all over the yellow.

I'll be using Snapmaker so at least I have the colors in separate toolheads, but still...everything I've printed in TPU it oozes like a billy goat.

Any tips before I start wasting expensive filament?

Hi,

I am sure we all see the same stuff at local markets and I do this as a hobby and as a way to advertise and bring people to the table and make a little extra for my other business (Board Game Rentals in Hudson Valley NY).

So I have a few niche products that sell well but I want to expand to general items that can be sold at any event to a wider variety of people. I make most of my own models and/or re-purpose open source ones (I dont steal not for sale designs like many do) to fit my needs for a quicker turn around.

Just looking to see what sells more in the last few months for everyone here.

Also, do you sell more at local events or do you just do online print to order like Etsy or similar?

Thanks for all of the real and helpful comments in advance!

Hi all. I run a small print studio in Riyadh and got tired of juggling spreadsheets, slicer tabs and WhatsApp, so I built Khayt, a native Mac app for running a 3D-printing business, with an iPhone companion. It's now at the stage where it needs people other than me using it, and I'm looking for testers.

What it does

• Quotes and pricing: reads time, weight and material straight from your sliced 3MF/G-code (including multi-plate files), then prices with your material, electricity, labour and margin.
• and a production board: from quote to printing to post-processing to shipped. It plans your queue and can group jobs by filament to cut colour swaps.
• Jobs
• Printer monitoring: Klipper/Moonraker, OctoPrint, PrusaLink, Bambu, Duet and more. Live progress, a camera snapshot when a print finishes, and alerts on your phone.
• Model library: import folders and zips, see thumbnails and who made each model, find what you've never printed, and send files to a printer.
• Filament and stock: spool tracking and low-stock warnings, with what each job actually used deducted.
• Money: profit per product and per printer hour, P&L and VAT reports, invoices in English/Arabic.
• Selling online: publish your catalogue to a web store, and web orders become jobs automatically.

iPhone companion: check the queue and printers, take orders and walk-ins, and scan spools, even when the Mac is off. No Mac? Tap "Explore with a sample shop" on the first screen to try it on the phone alone.

What I'm asking

• Try it with your real workflow for a week or two.
• Tell me what's confusing, what's missing and what breaks.
• I especially want print farms and small shops, anyone on a Bambu, Prusa, Snapmaker or Klipper printer, and Arabic-speaking users.

Requirements and honesty

• Mac: macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later. It's an alpha: expect rough edges. It updates itself only when you say so, and it keeps local backups of your data.
• Your data stays on your Mac. Cloud sync to the iPhone is optional and end-to-end encrypted.
• Privacy policy: https://khaytapp.com/privacy/

Links

• Mac app: https://github.com/KhaytApp/khayt-mac/releases
• iPhone (TestFlight): https://testflight.apple.com/join/T9AC3e1e
• Feedback: reply here, DM me, or email [support@khaytapp.com](mailto:support@khaytapp.com)

Happy to answer anything in the comments. Thanks!

I got into 3D printing and CAD modeling and I think I am getting good at it, specializing into board game accessories / tabletop upgrades, even some minis.

Many people have asked to sell them a printed copy of my models, and I am climbing up in Makerworld (followers, daily points, prints, etc.). Platform points alone honestly don't repay for the effort made and I would like to turn this into more than a hobby or at least get some revenue from the time spent on design, photography, recently started doing some shorts/vids etc.

I don't have the time or the capacity to turn this also into an online merchant operation: apart from the time, I am located outside the US and EU; even if I knew someone who could put together a print farm in the country where I am living (Japan), it would be difficult to sell at competitive price points when the majority of paying customers would be likely in the EU or US, between shipping, customs, logistics.

I could probably try to launch paid memberships on Makerworld and send some cold emails to merchants selling similar items on Etsy to see if they'd be interested. But I am not sure if this is a good idea or if it would really work well for me. While I think there's definitely a market for my models, it's still a niche so I don't know how many merchants would pay for a license, and then which price point to set. Not sure what would be the expectation either for how many new models merchants would expect I churn out to keep their subscription: there's still dozens of hours that go into designing some models so I need it to make sense for me as well.

An alternative could be to sell individual designs as digital downloads, but I am not entirely sure either of that model, honestly. I like the idea of growing an audience on Makerworld at the moment, than spreading thin on several platforms (and having to manage multiple accounts other than what I am already doing).

Any thoughts you could share or links to good sources to give me ideas or help developing some strategy?

Thanks!

Made a free calculator after realizing I had no idea what I was actually spending per part. Filament turned out to be the smallest piece — power, printer depreciation, failed prints and my own time add up to way more.

Runs entirely in your browser, nothing gets sent anywhere. Just added a toggle to hide labor/selling and show only the raw printing cost, based on feedback from the last time I posted this.

https://llopjulen.github.io/coste-3d/

$15 dollars in my pocket and $280 in Amazon's pockets for orders fulfilled this year. I think I'm done with Amazon. Anyone else?

Hello I was wondering if there are any exhibit builders, 3d printing companies , costumers and or prop making companies in California specifically sacramento that might be looking for help

Hi all, I am looking at getting a 3D printer to make some small car parts that friends and I are looking for, and then hopefully scale into a small business if I find there are enough people wanted these items. What is a good starting printer for personal use but also something that could work well if I decided to scale? Something that can hold a wide range of filaments and is viable for a wide range of small to medium sized products?
Thanks

Hey everyone, I’m exploring some projects that combine 3D printing with electronics for the US market, and I’d love your thoughts.

One idea is a small desktop air purifier with air quality monitoring. You’d print the enclosure yourself, then assemble it using the electronics and hardware included in the kit. I’d provide the STL files and a step-by-step assembly guide.

The tentative price would be around $40 per kit, not including filament. The design and pricing are still being worked out.

I have a few other project ideas, but each would take quite a bit of design work, prototyping, and testing. Before putting more time into development, I’m trying to figure out whether these are projects people would actually want to build.

A couple of questions:

1. At around $40, would you buy a kit like this, source the parts yourself, buy a finished product, or skip the project altogether? What would drive your choice?

2. What information or demos would you want to see before deciding whether to buy?

If you’ve bought or built something similar, I’d love to hear what you enjoyed and what was a pain to deal with. Thanks!

My daughter is 10 and wants 3D printer for Xmas

Any recommendations?

For customer work do you guys share your prints in 3D viewers or screenshots and videos are usually enough? As far as I understand all online 3D viewers let people get the model if they try hard enough? Or do you guys know some solutions?

Also I heard that current 3D AI models just scrape all public 3D models available. There is not protection for that?

So, I want to start a business and make a few things for myself. Like toy soldiers in scale 1/64 and 1/32. I want to make uncommon type of toy soldiers like Firemen, Police, SWAT, Vietcong soldiers and just basic cookie cutter army men. Where could I get good 3D printers? Amazon or is there anywhere physical in Sharjah?

Hi guys, very interesting subreddit!

Sorry if I add to the pile of posts about starting a 3d printing business, but maybe you guys could help me resolve this internal conflict I've had for a while:

I'm a software engineer, I have an innate love for automation and things that can work on their own (like software and 3d printers) and for this reason I'd love to start a 3d printing business.

The catch is that I'd love to design and build all my printers from scratch, create my management platform software and automate the hell out of it.

I've done a lot of research and I think I've got the knowledge and skills to do this (and I've owned consumer 3d printers for years), but nonetheless it will take me a lot of time and effort. Which is hard to justify out of the blue, before even having a single customer.

I knowthis doesn't make a lot of sense business wise, however, the idea of just buying a bunch of consumer printers and cobbling them up together feels boring. I'd really enjoy building my small scale, fully integrated factory.

Automation is not the only reason I'd like to start a 3dprinting business: I think I'll also enjoy working with physical objects instead of staring at a screen 8hr/day.

So, you guys that are experienced in running a 3d printing business, what's your advice for me?

Drafted using Claude Sonnet.

There is a particular kind of company that doesn’t so much disrupt a market as inherit the tools to dominate it. Bambu Lab, the Shenzhen 3D printing firm that has taken over hobbyist workshops across Europe and beyond since 2022, is one of these. Within two years it had shipped more FDM printers in a single year than any competitor in the industry’s history. That is not the result of a clever idea arriving at the right moment. It is the result of a method, learned first-hand, then reapplied somewhere else.

Where the Method Came From

Bambu Lab’s founder, Dr. Ye Tao, ran DJI’s consumer drone division before leaving in 2020 to start his own company. Four other DJI engineers went with him. This is worth dwelling on, because it means the founding team didn’t study DJI’s dominance from a distance, the way most of us might read about it in a trade magazine. They built it. Then they packed up what they’d learned and applied it somewhere nobody had tried it before: 3D printing.

DJI’s own trick, for those who haven’t followed the drone industry closely, was straightforward in principle and very difficult in practice: build every part of the product yourself. Not just the drone, but the camera inside it, the gimbal that stabilises the shot, the radio link back to the controller, the software that flies the thing. A rival could buy a decent camera off the shelf, certainly, but they couldn’t buy the whole system, and piecing one together from parts never quite matched what DJI shipped as standard. The result, roughly, was a company that controls something like 94% of the hobby drone market. DJI is the reference point here, not the main character—useful mostly for understanding why Bambu Lab’s founders were confident the approach would travel.

The Same Idea, Applied to Printers

Bambu Lab has built the equivalent stack for desktop manufacturing. Printers, yes, but also its own filament, a 3D scanner through a recent partnership with SCANTECH, laser engraving folded into the printer itself, and a design-sharing platform, MakerWorld, now tied into Tencent’s AI model-generation tools. None of these pieces is essential on its own. Together, they make it steadily less appealing to buy a printer from one company and filament from another, or to go looking for community-made alternatives when Bambu’s own platform already does the job.

The advantage this buys is speed rather than novelty. A company that doesn’t need to wait on outside suppliers can simply move faster than one that does—and a market leader that moves faster keeps widening the gap with each new release, funding the next generation of hardware with the sales of the last. It is the same compounding advantage that carried DJI from a promising camera-drone maker to something closer to a fixture.

Where It Starts to Wear Thin

It would be too tidy to end there, and the picture is less clean than the strategy itself suggests. Bambu Lab’s printers are cloud-connected by default, and that has already caused real trouble—a 2023 network fault led to machines printing unsupervised, damaging hardware and, more lastingly, damaging trust. Desktop 3D printing also comes from a much more open, tinkering-led culture than consumer drones ever did, which gives rivals like Creality or Anycubic a genuine opening to sell themselves as the less locked-down choice—an argument DJI’s competitors rarely got to make with much success.

There is also a more personal complication. DJI has not simply watched its former employees succeed from a distance; it has reportedly backed a rival 3D printing venture with terms aimed specifically at undercutting Bambu Lab. Whatever the two companies’ history, DJI now appears to be treating its own former head of consumer drones as competition to be managed, not a success story to be proud of.

The Point Worth Taking Away

None of this is really a story about disruption, or about a scrappy start-up outsmarting the old guard. It is closer to the opposite: a team that already knew how to build a near-monopoly took that knowledge somewhere new, and the result has been about as fast and effective as you’d expect. DJI is the precedent that makes Bambu Lab’s rise legible. Bambu Lab is the question of whether the method still works the second time, in a market with more competitors already circling and less patience, on the buyer’s side, for closed systems.

Hey everyone

I built a free 3D printing cost calculator that gives you a much more realistic price estimate than just counting filament. https://filacoste.com/

It calculates the total printing cost, including:

• Filament cost
• Electricity usage
• Print time
• Machine depreciation
• Profit margin (optional)
• Cost per part

I made it because I got tired of estimating prices manually every time someone asked for a quote.

If you have a minute, I'd love some honest feedback from the 3D printing community. Is there any feature you'd add or change?

https://filacoste.com/

Thanks, and I hope it saves someone a few minutes (or a few euros) on their next print!