Print farm math

Should we buy printers, or prove the product first?

Use the calculator to compare a small in-house farm with an outsourced fulfilment pilot. The numbers are yours: printer cost, demand, labour, failures, filament, energy, packing and overhead.

Run the numbers Compare fulfilment costs

This is not a Makr3D rate card

Use real quotes when we have them.

Hardware cash outlay and depreciation
Labour for plate clearing, QA, packing and dispatch
Failure rate, remakes and rejected parts
Filament, electricity, packing and overhead
Printer utilisation and capacity pressure

Buying printers is easy

The hard part is the operating system around them: profiles, spares, people, plate clearing, QA standards, packing and dispatch.

Demand is uneven

A viral product can overload a room, then drop back to idle machines. Utilisation decides whether hardware is an asset or a fixed cost.

Fulfilment is the product

Customers judge the item that arrives, not the printer that made it. The real test is repeatable Print options and clean dispatch.

Your farm assumptions

Replace the defaults with your real quotes, labour rate and product mix. Nothing is sent to Makr3D.

Printers

How many machines we would buy or dedicate.

Printer cost

Hardware cost per printer, before spares and shelving.

Payback period

Spread hardware cost across this many months.

Orders per month

Finished customer orders, not print attempts.

Print time per order

Average plate time for one order.

Failure and remake rate

Failed prints, reprints, damaged items and QA rejects.

Labour per order

Slicing and sending the job, plate clearing, QA, boxing, labelling and dispatch handling.

Labour rate

Use the real loaded hourly cost, not minimum wage.

Filament cost

Average material cost per kg after waste and spool mix.

Material per order

Average finished grams before remake multiplier.

Packing cost

Boxes, labels, inserts and consumables per order.

Monthly overheads

Rent share, shelving, maintenance, software and spares.

Electricity

Tariff per kWh.

Average printer draw

Average watts while printing.

Target outsource fulfilment

Use a real Makr3D quote or another fulfilment quote. This field is not a rate card.

Monthly model

Own the farm or prove the SKU first?

In-house cost per order: £6.48
Outsource input per order: £5.00
Hardware cash outlay: £3,995
Monthly difference: Save £886.99
Printer utilisation: 38.9%
Printers needed at 70%: 3

At these assumptions, in-house production breaks even against outsourcing at roughly £6.48 per fulfilled order before we price in management attention, space, hiring risk, customer support and peak-season cover.

Cost breakdown

Hardware amortisation: £166.46
Material including remakes: £699.60
Labour: £2,250
Electricity: £50.93
Packing consumables: £270.00
Overheads and spares: £450.00

Throughput reality check

What this order volume actually asks of you every month.

150 h

Hands-on labour

About 19 working days of your time, before any customer support.

1,399.2 h

Printer-hours

After remakes, that is 2 machines running around the clock all month.

35 kg

Filament

Roughly 35 spools to buy, store, dry and keep loaded.

Failed prints

Prints to spot, diagnose and re-run at your failure rate.

Plus 181.9 kWh of electricity on the meter.

How we use the answer

Treat the result as a go/no-go for ownership, not just a cost comparison.

If the SKU is unproven, outsourcing buys time and optionality. We can test demand through Makr3D integrations, manual orders or CSV import without turning a spare room into production space.

If the SKU is proven, high-volume and operationally simple, owning capacity may make sense. That is the point: buy printers when the economics and workload are obvious, not because a product had one good week.

Prove one Print option before buying a farm.

Upload a file, then bring orders in by CSV, manual entry or the public API from whichever channel you sell on. We print, QA, pack and ship from our UK-based European hub while we learn what sells.

Start selling See the hub