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3D printing
Getting a 3D print quoted normally means sending your file to a stranger and waiting for a human to open it. This page measures the model in your own browser and prices it against our published rate card while you sit there. Nothing is uploaded to produce the number — and it costs you nothing, because the measurement was never the hard part.
How it usually goes
Next working day
Email the file. Somebody opens it, slices it, works out a price and replies — often inside 24 hours, which is fast for work done by hand.
Your model is now on their computer.
How it goes here
Seconds
Drop the file in below. It is measured in this tab and priced against our published rate card while you watch. Change the material, the quality or the quantity and it re-prices.
Your model never leaves your machine.
The price comes back from our server. The rate card behind it is never sent to your browser, which is why the calculation happens there and the measurement happens here.
Quote a part
Load the model, choose what it is printed in, read the price. Change anything and it re-prices. It prices printing — material, machine time, the hands-on work, and the purge if the part changes colour.
Step one
Drop your CAD or mesh file here to inspect geometry, select materials, and calculate live production pricing instantly.
Step two
Cost-effective, wide colour palette, ideal for enclosures, decorative items & functional parts
Tougher and more impact-resistant than standard PLA, with the widest colour range.
Smooth, non-reflective matte finish that hides layer lines. Clean, professional look for display and functional parts.
Tougher than PLA and handles heat and damp. The sensible default for anything that lives outdoors or gets handled.
Heat resistant and machinable — it can be drilled, tapped and glued with solvent.
ABS that does not go chalky in sunlight. The choice for an outdoor enclosure.
Flexible and hard-wearing. Gaskets, bumpers, strain reliefs, phone cases. Prints slowly, which is reflected in the price.
Stone-look speckle straight off the printer. Prints like PLA; the finish is the point.
High-gloss metallic sheen. Shows layer lines more than matte does, so it suits display pieces over functional parts.
Translucent rather than glass-clear — light passes, detail does not. Good for diffusers and light pipes.
Fine detail and a smooth surface an FDM nozzle cannot reach. Brittle, and it degrades in sunlight.
Resin detail with enough toughness to be handled and fitted.
High strength, temperature resistance, low friction, and mechanical rigidity
Tough, low friction and fatigue resistant — living hinges, gears, snap fits. Absorbs moisture, so it is dried before printing.
Nylon with chopped carbon fibre: stiff, dimensionally stable and light. For jigs, fixtures and brackets that must not flex.
Softer and stretchier than TPU — closer to rubber. For seals and grips where 95A is too stiff.
Step three
Save on machine setup fees by printing multiple units together.
15% is standard for non-structural parts. 40%+ for functional mechanical parts.
Converted automatically at live market exchange rates.
Essential for models with steep overhangs, bridges, or floating features. Automatically enabled or disabled based on your model's measured geometry upon upload.
Upload model in Step 1
Print quality
A part is built as a stack of slices. Thinner slices mean more of them: a smoother surface, and a longer print. Same part, same material, more stacking to do — which is why quality is a price control and not a preference.
Thinner layers use no more material — the part is the same size either way. They cost more because every layer carries a fixed overhead of Z moves and cooling that does not shrink when the layer does. And because a colour change happens per layer, a finer tier multiplies the purge as well as the time.
Roughly twice the layers of Draft, so roughly twice the machine time for the same filament. Right for lettering, threads and small parts where the surface IS the part. It cannot add detail the model does not already have.
The default, and the balance nearly every functional part wants. Layer lines are visible close up and invisible in a bracket behind a panel. Start here and move only if the part asks you to.
Fewest layers, so the least machine time and the lowest price of the three. Layer lines you can feel with a thumbnail, which is no obstacle at all for a fit check, a mock-up or a jig nobody looks at.
Resin behaves differently, and the difference is worth knowing before you choose: a resin layer is exposed all at once, so the print time depends on how many layers there are and not on how much resin is in each one. Halving the layer height doubles the print, whatever the part looks like. A tall thin part and a tall fat one take the same time.
Resin prints one colour at a time — there is no colour changer on that machine, so the section below applies to filament only.
Multi-colour
Every colour after the first has to be changed mid-print. The old filament is pushed out and dropped in the bin — around 0.55 g each time — and the change itself is about 55 seconds of cutting, unloading, feeding and purging before printing resumes.
It happens on every layer where the colours meet — on a real part about a third of what it could be, because colour is regional and the slicer carries the last colour of one layer into the next. On a tall part that still adds up to more material than the part itself.
So the calculator adds it, and shows it on its own line beside the part weight rather than folding it into one figure. Forty grams of part and 144 g of purge is the truth; a single blended number looks like a broken measurement, and somebody who cannot see where a charge came from concludes the calculator is wrong rather than that colour is expensive.
The control goes to twenty-four, which is as many as chained changers reach. It is priced the same way all the way up — linearly — so a high count is expensive rather than refused.
Computed with the same functions the calculator prices with, so this example and your quote cannot disagree. 0.55 g a change and about a third of the possible changes are what this workshop fits from finished jobs — black into white costs far more purge than black into grey, and a part laid so every layer crosses every colour purges on every layer — so both are figures that get re-fitted rather than constants.
More filament is thrown away than ends up in the part — 3.6× as much. Every colour change pushes the old filament out before the new one can print, and on a part like this that happens on roughly a third of the layers — colour is regional, so a change falls where two colours actually meet rather than on every layer. It is the honest reason multi-colour costs what it does, and it is why one colour is dramatically cheaper if the part does not need two.
There are cheaper ways to get colour, and we will suggest them before quoting the expensive one: print the parts separately in single colours and assemble them, or change colour once at a chosen height — one swap for the whole print instead of one on every layer where the colours meet.
Materials
This list is read from the workshop's own catalogue, so it is what is on the shelf rather than what a brochure once said. Choosing between PETG and PA-CF is not a spec comparison — it is deciding whether the part has to survive heat or load.
Stiff, accurate, inexpensive, and stocked in colours. This is where most parts belong, and where the decision is usually about how the part looks and where it will live.
Filament
Tougher and more impact-resistant than standard PLA, with the widest colour range.
13 colours
Filament
Smooth, non-reflective matte finish that hides layer lines. Clean, professional look for display and functional parts.
9 colours
Filament
Tougher than PLA and handles heat and damp. The sensible default for anything that lives outdoors or gets handled.
4 colours
Filament
Heat resistant and machinable — it can be drilled, tapped and glued with solvent.
2 colours
Filament
ABS that does not go chalky in sunlight. The choice for an outdoor enclosure.
2 colours
Filament · Flexible
Flexible and hard-wearing. Gaskets, bumpers, strain reliefs, phone cases. Prints slowly, which is reflected in the price.
2 colours
Filament
Stone-look speckle straight off the printer. Prints like PLA; the finish is the point.
1 colour
Filament
High-gloss metallic sheen. Shows layer lines more than matte does, so it suits display pieces over functional parts.
1 colour
Filament
Translucent rather than glass-clear — light passes, detail does not. Good for diffusers and light pipes.
1 colour
Resin
Fine detail and a smooth surface an FDM nozzle cannot reach. Brittle, and it degrades in sunlight.
2 colours
Resin
Resin detail with enough toughness to be handled and fitted.
1 colour
Several times the price of PLA, harder to print, and worth it only when the part has to survive something — heat, load, fatigue, friction. The colours are whatever the property comes in, which is usually black.
Filament
Tough, low friction and fatigue resistant — living hinges, gears, snap fits. Absorbs moisture, so it is dried before printing.
2 colours
Filament
Nylon with chopped carbon fibre: stiff, dimensionally stable and light. For jigs, fixtures and brackets that must not flex.
1 colour
Filament · Flexible
Softer and stretchier than TPU — closer to rubber. For seals and grips where 95A is too stiff.
1 colour
Printing in something not listed? Send the part over — most engineering filaments run on the same machine, and it is a question of whether the material suits what the part has to do.
3D modelling & CAD design
A sketch on paper, a broken part that snapped, a hole that needs a custom bracket, or simple measurements. That is a normal way to start, and our CAD engineers turn your physical parts, sketches, and requirements into precision production-ready 3D files.
Any one of these is enough to start a conversation. All of them is enough to start drawing.
A model you own, in formats that outlive us — not a print you have to come back to one supplier for.
How it is priced
A mounting bracket from three dimensions is usually an hour. Reverse-engineering a curved housing from photographs is a different job entirely, and no arithmetic performed on a photograph can tell the two apart — which is exactly why the calculator on this page does not try. It prices printing, from geometry it can measure. Drawing is quoted as a figure of its own once we have seen what you send, agreed before anything starts, and shown as its own line. Once the model exists you can put it through the calculator yourself, like any other file.
Send whatever you have — sketch, photo, or numbers. We review it and reply with a fixed drawing quote.
How the number is made
Three stages, in two different places, for one specific reason each.
The file is parsed in this tab. Bounding box, enclosed volume, surface area and triangle count come out of the geometry itself, and the same pass finds any openings and closes the ones it can — so an ordinary export artefact costs you a footnote rather than your quote.
Dimensions, volume, openings closed
Shell, infill and support volume are modelled from the mesh and your settings, then converted to grams at the material's own density. Print time comes from extruded volume and layer count, and the purge from colour changes per layer. One of those numbers is good; the others are heuristics, and the page says which is which.
Grams a unit, minutes a unit
Grams, minutes and a quantity go to our server. It loads the published rate card, costs the job and returns a total. The card itself never reaches your browser, which is the only arrangement in which a published price list and a private cost structure can both be true.
One total, in your currency
Limits
A calculator that hides its assumptions is not faster to use, it is just harder to argue with. Every one of these moves the number, and none of them is visible in a triangle soup — so they are on the page rather than in a footnote nobody opens.
Questions
No model yet, an assembly rather than a part, more colours than the changer holds, or something the calculator refused — all of that is a conversation rather than a form. Tell us what the part has to do and we will tell you whether printing it is the right answer.