There is no published figure, because it depends on what you paid, what you print and how long you keep the machine. But the range that matters is narrow, and picking a number inside it beats the alternative.
Here is the same 120 g part over a 10-hour print at three different allowances:
| Hourly allowance | Machine time | Total cost |
|---|---|---|
| 10 cents | $1.00 | $3.82 |
| 30 cents | $3.00 | $5.82 |
| 50 cents | $5.00 | $7.82 |
The choice moves the total by more than the filament does.
How to derive your own figure
Two components, added:
Amortisation. Purchase price divided by the printing hours you expect before the machine is retired or rebuilt. A budget machine kept for a few thousand hours lands in the low tens of cents; an expensive one kept just as long lands higher, which is the whole reason a two-thousand-dollar printer is not automatically better value than two seven-hundred-dollar ones.
Consumables. Nozzles, build plates, hotends, belts, PTFE, bearings, lubricant. Add up a year of receipts and divide by the year's printing hours. This term is usually smaller than people fear and larger than they account for.
What makes it move
- Abrasive filament. Carbon-filled and glass-filled grades destroy brass nozzles in a fraction of the life they would give on PLA. A hardened nozzle costs more and lasts, which is cheaper.
- Chamber temperature. Running an enclosure hot ages belts, bearings and plastic parts faster than the same hours in an open frame.
- Utilisation. Fixed costs spread over more hours fall per hour. A machine printing twelve hours a day carries a much lower hourly figure than one printing twelve hours a month, for identical wear.
Why zero is the only certainly wrong answer
Setting the allowance to zero says the machine is immortal and its consumables are free. Every calculator that omits this term produces cheerful, reproducible, wrong numbers — and the error is largest on exactly the long unattended prints where people most want a reliable figure.
Even a badly-estimated 30 cents is closer to the truth than a confident nought.
Try your own figure against a real part in the print cost calculator.