Transcript:
If you own a 3D printer, I’’m quite sure that you have already been asked “Oh. Can you print this for me? Just tell me what you wanna have for it”. And if you do this for friends and family charging only for filament is fine. But what if you really want to earn some money with 3D printing? In this video, I’’m going to show you how I quote parts for customers and what costs you really need to consider. Guten Tag everybody I’m Stefan and welcome to CNC Kitchen. I have to admit that I actually hate business administration, and I try to avoid it as much as possible. But when I started printing parts for customers, I actually had to come up with a way to make reasonable quotes. In this video, I’’m going to show you the EXCEL spreadsheet that I use for this process and explain you how to use it; so that you can also get an idea How much your prints actually cost. I am an engineer and never studied business, so some assumptions and methods that I use might not be 100% correct, but they work pretty well for me Also. This method is probably too simple If you run a big business, But if you 3D print as I side business should be sufficient. You can find a link to my EXCEL spreadsheet down in the description. I would be really interested to hear your idea about my approach and what you maybe would have done differently. There is some chance that you also find an error in my calculation. So please leave a comment down below. All right, so let’’s dive right in. I split up the costs of a print into 6 sections:. Material cost, electricity, printer, depreciation, preparation and post-processing labor costs and other consumables. Maybe different to the expectation of some filament is actually not the biggest item in that calculation and electricity costs are more or less negligible. Depending on how much you value your time, labor can actually be the biggest part of the total costs of a print. So the spreadsheet has a summary worksheet, a list of printers, a list of materials and a general settings. Worksheet Input Fields are orange calculations, grey and results green. If you really want to calculate the cost of a print, you need to factor in that. Every print will wear out your printer a little bit. Depending on your printer lifetime assumptions, you can then calculate what one hour of printing actually costs. That’’s simply speaking depreciation. You can add a new printer in every line. They only need to have a unique name. Material diameter is at the moment only for information. Then you have the price of the printer when you bought It. Depreciation is usually calculated by the number of years. You can use a machine and the number of hours you use it every day. That’’s too complicated for me. So I made a guess on how many hours the printer will last until it’’s probably unusable anymore. A more expensive printer might last longer than a cheap China printer and therefore might be in the end cheaper to operate. Service cost is also a guess and includes the spare parts. You might need like nozzles, heat beds or bearings and does also involve the labor costs. You might need for the fixes. 10 to 25% of the printers. Price usually is a good estimation for that. The depreciation per hour is now calculated by simply dividing the sum of printer cost and service costs by the lifetime of the printer. The energy consumption of FDM printers is actually pretty low and values of 100 to 150W are realistic for printing PLA. I will probably include a second value for materials that require higher temperatures in the future. In the materials worksheet you can add a bunch of filaments that you use. The value’s a pretty self-explanatory. Maybe consider adding the shipping costs to your filament price because that is something you will have to pay. Nozzle temperature, print temperature and length per roll are only for informational purposes. All filaments are then normalized to the price per kilogram, which is then considered for the calculation. Just as the name suggests, the general worksheet contains some general information like the price per kilowatt hour in your region. Labor cost is a point which is debatable. How much do you value your time? As we have seen at the beginning, depending on the part, you print, this might be the biggest item on the bill. In my opinion, you should not put a value too low in there. Even though you might like tinkering and 3D printing, if you want to earn something, then this is important. This also does not only include your salary, but also software rent and insurances. You might need to run your prints. But what you have to consider is how much the customer is willing to pay. If you only make easy parts, which almost anybody can do, then you will need to be okay with a lower salary because otherwise you might be too expensive. If you make really complex parts, which need experience then value you time higher. I think a reasonable value should be between 20 and 60€. In the end, you still need to be competitive. So in order to reduce your labor time and therefore, the final costs spending 150€ on Simplify3d might be a good investment if this makes creating and removing supports easier, Also using a machine that can print soluble support material might reduce the costs in the end. Because you don’’t need to worry about support anymore at all. Prints will fail, And if they shouldn’’t make you bankrupt. You need to consider them in. You cost calculations? I think 10% is a good estimation, but that’’s up to you. At last, you can set the money unit to your currency of choice. All right, so let’’s go to the main worksheet. The header is for information only. Under general details, you can chose one of the printers you have defined before. The same goes with the filament. Just use the drop-down menu and select your material of choice. Then you have to enter the amount of material that will be needed. In the current version, you enter this with the weight, but depending on the material type you use. This might be quite different. So make sure that you have set the right density in your slicer as you have in the material database. Also doublecheck the displayed length. If your slicer provides that information. Then you need to enter the printing time and this can also be tricky. If you have ever compared the printing time shown in your slicer to the actual time, the print took, you might have noticed that they can vary quite a bit. The actual print time usually is longer. The reason for this is that the slicers usually don’’t account for accelerations during printing, which do have a small influence, printing big parts with long printmoves but can drastically increase the print time of parts with many short moves. You can get better estimations if you use the online G-code Analyzer. If you know your printer settings, you can put them in there. Upload your g code file and get a pretty good estimation of the print time. The next section covers the labor costs. As I have already pointed out before this is the part where you really make money. The rest is only for covering the costs. Add the times you think you will need for model preparation and slicing. It will also take you some time to put the right material into your printer and maybe watch the first couple of layers to make sure that everything looks okay. This is time you dedicate on that print job, so you need to consider that for the price of a part. Post-processing does involve the time it takes you for removing the part from the printer and remove supports if there are any. Additional work includes things like sanding, gluing painting et cetera. In the miscellaneous section, you add the consumables. You need for each print. This can be, for example, adhesion spray tape, isopropanol for cleaning and others. So that’’s actually it. The section costs summarize the values of each item and can help you identify the cost drivers of your part. If you really want to make a quote for a part, you should consider a markup on your internal costs, because otherwise you are more or less only covering the costs and pay for your time. If you want to earn something and grow your business, then you need to make a profit and this is where you can adjust that. You will need to consider if the market or your customer is willing to pay more and if there are competitors. If you are too expensive, then you won’’t earn anything at all, but you also should not sell your work under your internal costs. Just a small pro-tip: If you make a quote for a customer, then don’’t round the value, but instead give an uneven number. This will, then at least look like as if you really know what you’’re doing and therefore make a really well calculated price. So I hope I was able to give you some interesting information about the costs involved in 3D printing, Even though this was probably not how you would have learned it in your business class. Give it a thumbs up. If you liked it, consider subscribing and leave a comment down below. Consider supporting me via Paypal or Amazon and take a look at my other videos. Thanks for watching auf Wiedersehen. And I will see you next time.