1.02 hours in PLA: 25 cm³ of plastic, 12 mm tall, 0.2 mm layers at 100 mm/s.
The same case in TPU takes 3.36 hours, and none of that difference is geometry.
Flexible filament is a feeding problem
TPU is pushed through the extruder like a rope rather than a rod. Drive it hard and it buckles in the gap between the gears and the melt zone, so the safe approach is to slow the whole print down — 30 mm/s rather than 100 is a normal setting, and that alone triples the job.
A direct-drive extruder with a short constrained filament path tolerates more. A Bowden machine tolerates much less. This is one of the few settings where the printer's mechanical layout, not its firmware, sets the ceiling.
The layer height lever
A case is a thin shell, so its layer count is low to begin with: 60 layers at 0.2 mm across a 12 mm depth. Coarsen to 0.28 mm and it becomes 43 layers and 44 minutes in PLA.
For a case that is a defensible trade — the outside is a grip surface, not a display surface, and layer lines on it are arguably useful. For a case in a translucent colour where the lines will show, it is not.
What actually decides the wall clock
Not the print. The fitting.
A case has to clear a camera bump, a button, a port and a corner radius, all measured from a handset you cannot easily model. Two or three iterations is normal, so the realistic figure for "how long to print a phone case" is closer to a day than to an hour — spread across attempts rather than spent in one.
Once the model is right, an hour is an hour. Getting the model right is the part worth planning for.
Printing several
A case is small enough that a 256 mm plate holds a handful. The layer count does not change when you add more, so four cases take barely longer than one — this is the classic case for batching, and it applies to any short, wide part.
Your handset's case depth and your own speed go straight into the print time estimator. What the three material options cost is worked out at phone case print cost.