What printing actually costs.

Most Indian print shops advertise a rate per gram, and it is the number customers ask for first. It is also a poor guide, because material is usually not the largest part of the cost.

Machine time generally dominates. A printer occupied for fourteen hours costs what it costs regardless of how much plastic went through it — so two parts of identical weight can differ substantially in price if one is a squat solid block and the other is tall, thin and covered in support structures. Weight simply does not capture that.

We quote per part against your actual file, because that is the only way the number is meaningful. What goes into it:

• Machine time — driven by height, path complexity, layer height and how much support the geometry needs.
• Material mass — including support material, which is paid for and then thrown away.
• Material type — TPU runs slower than PETG and is priced accordingly. See TPU printing.
• Setup — paid once per job, not per part, which is why ordering the full quantity together is cheaper.
• Post-processing — support removal, drilling or reaming critical holes, inserts, finishing.

If you have three quotes for the same file with a threefold spread, the difference is usually not margin — it is print settings that nobody stated.

A part at 15% infill with two perimeter walls uses a fraction of the machine time and material of the same part at 40% infill with five walls. Both are "the part you sent". Only one of them survives being used. The cheapest quote is frequently a display model priced as a functional one, and you find out when it breaks.

So when comparing, ask each supplier for wall count, infill percentage and layer height. Any shop that will not tell you is not quoting the same thing as the one that will.

• 01 — Hollow the solid volume. Thick solid sections are the most expensive thing in a print. Shell them and let infill carry the load; a well-designed hollow part is often stiffer than the solid one it replaced.
• 02 — Design out the supports. Support material is time and plastic you pay for and discard, and it leaves marks. Chamfer instead of overhanging, and reorient features so they self-support.
• 03 — Split large parts. Two halves that pack the bed flat often print faster and cheaper than one tall part, and bond or bolt together fine.
• 04 — Accept a coarser layer where nobody looks. Layer height is close to a direct multiplier on time. If the part is internal, 0.3 mm costs a third of what 0.1 mm does.
• 05 — Order the whole quantity at once. Setup is per job. Three orders of twenty cost noticeably more than one order of sixty.

Most of these overlap with printing well rather than merely cheaply — see file preparation.

Printing has no tooling cost, so the per-part saving from ordering more is real but modest — it comes from setup, bed packing and material efficiency, not from amortising a tool. Expect a useful reduction at higher quantities, not a collapse in unit price.

That is also the honest limit of the process. Past a few hundred units, moulding usually wins, and the crossover depends on part size more than part count. We do both, so we will run the comparison and tell you when to stop printing — see low volume production.

There is no charge for a quote or a design review. Send the file and the quantity and you get a firm number, plus anything we spotted that is likely to fail. Charging for that would only mean finding the problems after you had paid for the parts.