How to Reduce Costs and Increase Efficiency with 3D Printing

What Are the Key Cost Drivers in 3D Printing?

How Do Material Costs Affect 3D Printing Projects?

Whether you use plastics, resins, or metals—each choice of material within these categories has a different price tag per kilo. Let’s take a closer look at plastics, as it’s the most commonly used 3D-printing material.

Basic plastic materials, like PLA, cost between $10 and $100 per kilo, with standard filaments being the cheapest and special options, like silk or color-changing PLA, being the most expensive. 

PETG, known for its durability, water resistance, and food-safe properties, can cost up to $120 per kg. However, if your product doesn’t require PETG’s unique properties, opting for PLA can significantly lower material costs.

Additionally, when using FDM and SLA 3D printing, remember to factor in the cost of the material needed for supporting structures.

What Are the Operational Costs of 3D Printing?

Operational costs of 3D printing include energy consumption, maintenance, and labor. To minimize these expenses:

• Optimize printing times and processes to lower energy consumption
• Perform regular maintenance to avoid breakdowns and downtime
• Automate where possible to reduce reliance on manual labor

How Do Time and Production Costs Influence 3D Printing Efficiency?

To calculate the production costs per unit, divide the total production costs by the total units manufactured in the period covered by those costs. This means slower production directly increases per-unit costs, making your products less competitive in the market.

That’s why optimizing printing efficiency is vital. Adjusting the printer’s settings, for instance, can help maximize output and reduce printing times—but it’s important to make these changes carefully to ensure the quality of the final product. Your choice of 3D printing software can also help reduce production time and costs.

How To Reduce Material Costs in 3D Printing?

How Do You Select the Right Material for Cost Savings?

Selecting the right material for your 3D printing project means balancing product requirements with your budget. Once these are clear, review the strengths and weaknesses of each material to determine the best fit for your use case.

Here’s a cost comparison between different 3D printing materials.

To find suitable alternatives at lower costs, consider the properties that your product requires.

For instance, if your product needs shock-absorbing properties, you can either use polypropylene or flexible elastomers like thermoplastic polyurethane. In this example, polypropylene costs $23–$53 per kilo, while TPU costs $40–$88 per kilo. So, PP is the more cost-effective 3D printing material option for this project.

If you require flexibility, soft PLA, flexible resin, and thermoplastic elastomers are suitable alternatives. Note that flexible resin is not a direct alternative, as a different printing technology (SLA) is required to work with the material.

What Are the Best Ways to Optimize Material Usage?

After choosing a cost-effective material, focus on minimizing waste by optimizing material usage. This often involves hollowing out models or using infill patterns. For structural strength, higher infill percentages are essential, while lower percentages or hollow structures work for non-critical components. 

Selecting the right infill pattern—such as honeycomb, gyroid, or grid—will further reduce material use. Just remember that each has a different printing time, strength, and density.

How Can Recycling and Reusing Materials Lower Costs?

Waste in 3D printing often comes from failed prints, excess material, and support structures. Dealing with this waste is a surefire way to reduce 3D printing costs.

Some waste, however, is unavoidable—much like the marks left by support structures in FDM printing. SLS avoids these marks entirely, since its supporting powder leaves no residue. Moreover, the powder is easily recyclable and reusable. With FDM, on the other hand, plastics need to be remade into spools to be reused—which can be expensive to do in-house.

Thankfully, companies like P&G and Watsons in Hong Kong turn waste plastics into 3D printing materials. Sourcing filament spools from such companies is a great way to lower costs while reducing your environmental impact.

What Strategies Can Improve 3D Printing Efficiency?

How Can Optimizing Print Settings Improve Efficiency?

Fine-tuning your 3D printer’s settings can enhance efficiency and lower costs, but you must be careful not to negatively affect the quality of the final product.

For instance, increasing print speed lowers production time but may compromise intricate or complex geometries. So when working on such geometries—or when using small layer heights or working with flexible materials—stick to slower speeds, such as 30 mm/s. For sturdier materials like PLA or simpler, large-scale designs, you can safely increase speed to 60 mm/s.

You can also customize layer height to improve printing efficiency. Higher layer heights are suitable for designs where detail or visible layer lines are less critical, such as FDM. But don’t compromise on quality if you need smooth surfaces and fine details. We recommend using software simulation to fine-tune these parameters without resorting to trial and error.

How Does Design for 3D Printing (DfAM) Reduce Costs and Improve Efficiency?

While similar to Design for Manufacturing (DFM), Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) optimizes designs specifically for 3D printing—ensuring efficient use of materials, time, and resources. Key principles include:

• Lightweight structures: Using cellular or lattice designs to reduce material use and overall weight while retaining structural integrity.
• Minimal supports: Eliminates or reduces support structures to cut material usage and post-processing time. This principle pushes for the design of self-supporting structures or orienting them in a way that they self-support.
• Modular design: Try to print multiple components in a single run instead of one at a time. This will help to save on setup costs while also reducing material waste and machine downtime.

What Are the Benefits of Batch Printing and Automation?

Batch printing maximizes efficiency by printing multiple parts in a single job, optimizing bed space and minimizing waste. Besides reducing material waste, this approach also saves time and energy. For instance, 3D printing design agency MagCAD Designs currently batches 20–50 cycling components per job, with plans to scale this to 100+ parts per run.

Automation, on the other hand, streamlines post-processing tasks like sanding, painting, or smoothing. This reduces manual labor costs and eliminates human error, leading to more consistent and better-quality finishes.

It’s also important to select your post-processing processes carefully. Vapor polishing, for instance, is better for smoothing out plastic surfaces and even easier to automate than sanding. 

When it comes to painting, instead of handling this as a post-processing activity, consider using color 3D printing or colored filaments—thereby lowering costs. Dyeing is a faster and less costly alternative, but keep in mind that painting produces high-quality results that last longer.

Ultimately, try to weigh your options and see which one is cheaper to automate without sacrificing quality.

How Does Maintenance and Calibration Keep 3D Printing Costs Down?

What Are the Best Regular Maintenance Practices for 3D Printers?

Regular 3D printer maintenance ensures the hardware performs optimally, without failures like clogging and jamming. Maintenance typically includes:

• Cleaning the FDM printer’s nozzle after each print, or once weekly, to remove debris and stuck residue
• Lubricating the rods every few months to maintain printing speed
• For SLS printers, inspecting and cleaning IR sensors weekly
• Daily inspection and cleaning of the laser window and black body

The specific maintenance schedule will depend on the printer type and manufacturer, so always follow the instructions in the user manual.

Printer calibration is crucial to minimize material waste while ensuring build quality. While exact steps may vary by printer type, a typical calibration process includes:

• Leveling the bed before each print
• Checking the nozzle and hotend temperature
• Verifying the build piston is in the start position
• Checking extrusion steps
• Adding the initial powder layers

As with maintenance, always follow the recommended steps in the user manual. While the underlying 3D printing technology might be similar, implementation will always depend on the specific hardware.

How Can Software Tools Help Reduce Costs and Increase Efficiency?

Advanced 3D printing software offers features that help to reduce printing costs while boosting efficiency. Popular examples include UltiMaker Cura, Fusion 360, and Simplify3D.

UltiMaker Cura has a marketplace where you can download material profiles from leading brands. These automatically optimize your printer’s settings when printing specific materials, which eliminates the need for manual setup.

While convenient, this may require multiple testing phases or trial-and-error experimentation to get the best settings.

Fusion 360, on the other hand, offers cloud collaboration that boosts efficiency when working as a team.

This enables experts from different fields to concurrently work on the same design file, leading to a faster design process and production time.

Simplify3D and Fusion 360 also have simulation and preview features, which verify the build files to provide a realistic view of the exact size, properties, and speed of each additive instruction before printing.

This reduces the material waste associated with trial and error, while optimizing settings for maximum efficiency.

Simplify3D can also generate supports automatically based on overhang angles, which can then be customized.

This results in a sturdy structure that uses the least possible material. Dynamic infill density is another material-saving feature, as it automatically increases material density near the surface to create a strong exterior.

Using Simplify3D, Austin-based 3DPros has been able to shave 20% off their production costs while reducing the print time from 23 to 15 hours—all without sacrificing quality.

What Real-World Examples Show How Businesses Save with 3D Printing?

Reducing 3D printing costs begins with smart design choices, where the right tools and practices can deliver substantial savings.

Companies like Brash Inc. have used Fusion 360’s simulation extension to test structural loads in designs, ensuring compliance and optimizing designs for injection molding.

While Nerc Precision Engineering Ltd. faced difficulties with other CAM systems, switching to Fusion 360 made their CAM programming 50–100% faster.

By picking the right advanced 3D printing software, they were able to reduce production costs, increase throughput, and achieve a 400% increase in business revenue within a year.

Just remember that this growth isn’t the result of software alone—it also requires regular printer maintenance, calibration, smart material choices, DfAM, optimized print settings, batch printing, and material recycling.

Conclusion

As we’ve discussed in this article, reducing 3D printing costs requires a holistic approach that includes:

• Efficient product design that strategically considers DfAM
• Simulation tools to minimize material waste
• Selecting cost-effective materials that meet project requirements
• Optimizing material usage
• Recycling and reusing materials wherever possible
• Regular printer maintenance and calibration

Remember to implement the optimization process gradually, so that you can measure the impact of each step. 

It’s also important to stay up to date with the latest tools, tips, and techniques—so visit our blog regularly, as we frequently post new content that can help you optimize your 3D printing operations.

For advice, contact us for a personalized consultation.

We recognize that every business has unique challenges and goals, so we can help you develop a cost-effective and efficient 3D printing strategy tailored to your needs.