What filament really costs a print farm, per kg and per part
TL;DR
- A printer running 16 h/day at 12 mm³/s uses roughly 20 kg a month.
- Tier pricing saves 12–35 %; batch consistency saves more by cutting failed prints.
- Use the calculator on the Print Farm page with your own numbers.
Usage per printer
Monthly usage in kg is printers × hours per day × 30 × volumetric flow (mm³/s) × 3600 × density ÷ 1,000,000. A single machine at 16 hours a day and 12 mm³/s of PLA (1.23 g/cm³) uses about 25 kg a month; a ten-printer farm uses around 250 kg.
Where the money goes
At retail a 1 kg spool of PLA costs $16–25. At 250 kg a month, the difference between a $16 and a $12 per-kg price is $1,000 a month. Failed prints cost more: a 5 % failure rate on 250 kg wastes 12.5 kg of material and, more importantly, machine hours.
That is why we publish batch consistency on bulk SKUs and hold ± 0.02 mm diameter tolerance: the price per kg matters, the price per good part matters more.
