Buying for paid work
If you are printing to sell, the purchase price is the least interesting number on the invoice. What decides whether a machine pays for itself is its cost per machine hour, how many hours a week you can keep it busy, and whether the parts it makes are good enough to sell twice.
| Printer | Purchase | Rated life | Cost / hour | Draw | Hours to repay | Weeks at 20 h/wk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry FDM (Elegoo Centauri 2) | $279 | 8,000 h | $0.0384/h | 125 W | 545 h | 27 wk |
| Mid FDM (Bambu Lab P1S) | $549 | 10,000 h | $0.0604/h | 105 W | 1073 h | 54 wk |
| High-end FDM (Bambu Lab X1 Carbon) | $999 | 12,000 h | $0.0916/h | 105 W | 1953 h | 98 wk |
Cost per hour is purchase price ÷ rated life plus a 10% maintenance allowance, as in the cost calculators. Hours to repay is purchase price ÷ $0.51, the profit per machine hour on a 100 g part with ten minutes of hand work.
Going from $279 to $999 multiplies the price by 3.6 but multiplies the hourly cost by only 2.4 ($0.0384 to $0.0916). That is because rated life rises with price, and because machine time is a small line next to material and labour: on the 100 g part, $0.18 of machine time against $1.50 of filament and $3.33 of hand work.
So what are you buying with the extra $720? Speed, uptime, an enclosure and a material range — none of which this dataset measures, and none of which we will invent a number for.
$279 class. Right answer for one-off orders, Etsy listings and learning what sells. At 4.8 machine hours per 100 g part you can deliver about 4 such parts in a 20-hour week. It repays itself in 27 weeks at that volume.
$549 class. The enclosure is what matters for paid work: ABS and ASA need a stable chamber, and those are the materials that survive a car dashboard. This is the tier where a batch of twenty identical parts becomes routine, and where a camera turns a failed print into a stopped one.
$999+ class. Hardened hotend for carbon-fibre and glass-filled material, higher chamber temperature, tighter dimensional repeatability. This tier only makes sense at 60+ paid machine hours a week or as the first unit of a farm, where the same part is produced on several machines and consistency between them is the product.
One recommendation per tier, all still being tested. Every card will show the price band from the retailer at the time of linking; today it shows the dataset listing price and a disabled button.
Coming soon — we are testing. No link yet, and no price is claimed beyond the dataset band below.
Coming soon — we are testing. No link yet, and no price is claimed beyond the dataset band below.
Coming soon — we are testing. No link yet, and no price is claimed beyond the dataset band below.
Price the work first, not the machine. The quote template tells you what a job is worth with your own margin; cost per gram covers the material; print time tells you whether it fits in a week. If those three do not clear the hourly cost many times over, the machine is not the problem.
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The $279 class entry machine: at $0.0384 per machine hour it is the lowest-risk way to learn what sells, and it repays itself in about 27 weeks at 20 paid hours a week on the 100 g part modelled here.
Only if you print ABS or ASA, or if the machine lives somewhere draughty. Enclosures stabilise the chamber and cut warping; for PLA and PETG at low volume, an open frame is fine.
Not twice, but it is not aimed at the same work. Its hourly cost is 1.5x the mid tier rather than 2x, and the extra money buys an enclosure, a hardened hotend and material range — value that only appears once you have the order volume to use them.