What PETG, ABS or TPU cost to print compared with PLA

“PETG is 15% dearer than PLA.” True, if you are talking about the spool. But that is not the question: the question is how much the part goes up.

It goes up 24 cents. From 5.11 € to 5.35 €. That is 4.6%.

And with ABS something stranger happens: it costs 20% more per kilo than PLA and the same part carries less than one cent more plastic. This article explains why, across the ten materials the calculator ships with.

The same part does not weigh the same in every material

Here is the trick almost nobody applies. When you change material you are not printing the same grams: you are printing the same volume. And every plastic has its own density, so the grams change by themselves.

This site's reference part is 60 grams of PLA, which at 1.24 g/cm³ is 48.4 cm³ of plastic. That same part, in each material, weighs this:

Between ABS and carbon fibre there are 12.6 grams of difference in the same part: ABS weighs 20% less. That offsets a good part of what it costs extra per kilo, and it explains the rest of this article.

If you compare at constant weight — “60 grams of this against 60 grams of that” — you are not comparing the same part: you are comparing a bigger ABS part against a PLA one.

The ABS case, in two lines

It is the clearest example of all this:

• PLA: 60.0 g × 20.00 €/kg = 1.20 € of plastic.
• ABS: 50.3 g × 24.00 €/kg = 1.21 € of plastic.

20% dearer per kilo, and less than a cent of difference in the part. The total cost goes from 5.11 € to 5.12 €: 0.2%.

So if somebody tells you they do not print in ABS because it is expensive, the reason will be something else — the heated bed, the smell, the warping, the ventilation — but not the money for the material.

The ten materials, with their real cost

This is the full table. Same part, same 5 h 30 of printer time, same quarter of an hour of your own handling, same 10% failure rate. The only thing that changes is the material.

Look at the extremes. From PLA to carbon fibre, the kilo multiplies by almost two and a half. The part goes up 38.5%: from 5.11 € to 7.08 €. It goes up, of course, but a lot less than the label suggests.

And between the first five on the list — PLA, ABS, PLA+, PETG and ASA — there are 39 cents of difference in total.

Why the price per kilo misleads so much

The reason is simple and it already appears in other guides here: the material is not the expensive part of a print. In PLA it is 23.5% of the cost. The rest is your time, the machine's depreciation, the failures and the electricity, and none of those four changes because you changed spool.

Not even with carbon fibre does the material reach half of what the part costs. For the plastic to be 50% of the cost in PLA, the spool would have to cost 70.00 € a kilo.

Put another way: when you move up in material, the price per kilo multiplies and the cost of the part is barely grazed, because the kilo only governs a quarter of the sum.

Buying cheaper PLA moves more than changing material

This is the practical consequence, and it runs against what almost everybody does.

PLA usually sells between 15.00 and 25.00 € a kilo. The same part, in PLA, inside that range:

End to end that is 66 cents, 13.8% of the part's cost. And the jump from PLA to ABS was less than a cent.

In other words: choosing your PLA supplier well weighs more than eighty times what switching to ABS does. You can check it by opening the calculator with a 15.00 € spool and pushing the price up to 25.

People spend afternoons deciding between PLA and PETG over money, then buy whichever spool is closest to hand. It should be the other way round: choose the material for what the part needs, and fight over the price within that material.

The four that do show

Not everything is equivalent. Four materials push the part up more than 15%, and with those the price does have to be redone:

TPU (flexible), +18.2%: the part goes from 5.11 € to 6.04 €. You can see it in the calculator with TPU loaded.

Nylon, +27.6%: 6.52 €.

Polycarbonate, +36.7%: 6.99 €, which you can check in the calculator with polycarbonate.

Carbon fibre, +38.5%: 7.08 €, the dearest on the list despite not being the one that costs most per kilo. It gets there because it is also the densest: the same part weighs 62.9 g.

With these four the material already weighs between a third and a little over 40% of the cost, so the label on the spool starts to matter for real.

A whole year, material by material

The per-part differences are cents, but two hundred and forty parts a year — twenty a month — turn them into visible money:

Moving your entire production to PETG costs 56.62 € a year. That is less than a spool and a half, and in exchange you get parts that survive the sun and the heat of a car. Seen that way, the question stops being “which is cheaper”.

What this sum leaves out

It is worth saying plainly, because the table above leaves three things out and all three can change your result.

The print time is the same across the whole table. I kept the 5 h 30 fixed to isolate the effect of the material, but in reality it is not: TPU prints a good deal slower, and every extra hour adds depreciation, electricity and machine hours you cannot give to another part. With flexibles, the real cost rises by more than that 18%.

The failure rate is the same 10% for all of them. That is not true either: ABS warps, nylon absorbs moisture and carbon fibre wears out nozzles. If one material sends more parts to the bin, that costs, and it is worked out in the failures guide.

The prices per kilo are ranges, not price lists. The ones in the table are the midpoint of what is usually paid; your supplier will have their own, which is why the calculator lets you change them.

Even so, the conclusion holds: between similar materials, the price per kilo barely moves the cost of the part. What moves it is the time and the failure rate.

If the material changes the time, the sum changes

The table above keeps the 5 h 30 fixed to isolate the effect of the material. It is worth seeing what happens when that does not hold, because with flexibles it almost never does.

Every extra machine hour adds 14 cents between depreciation, electricity and the failure markup. It sounds like little, but it builds up:

If your TPU takes twice as long as PLA, the premium goes from 18.2% to 33.7%: it nearly doubles, and not one cent of that increase is material.

I am not putting a figure here for how much longer each material takes, because it depends on your printer, your profile and the part, and any number I gave you would be made up. What you can do is look at the time your slicer reports for each profile and put that into the calculator: there is your figure.

So which one do I pick?

If money barely decides, everything else does. These are not figures, they are the reasons one material gets chosen over another:

PLA is the one that gives least trouble: it prints easily, it does not smell and it needs no heated bed. Its weakness is heat. A PLA part inside a car in summer deforms, and that rules out half the catalogue of car accessories in one go.

PETG is the natural step up: it takes sun and weather far better, it is tougher and it does not go brittle. In exchange it strings more and takes a little more work to get clean.

ABS and ASA stand up to real temperature, but they warp and need an enclosure and ventilation. ASA is the ABS meant to live outdoors.

TPU gets chosen when the part has to bend: gaskets, feet, cases, damping. It is not a softer PLA, it is a different way of printing.

Nylon is for parts that rub and take knocks: gears, hinges, things that cannot break. It soaks up moisture like a sponge and has to be dried.

Polycarbonate is the strongest on the list and the most demanding to print. If you are not certain you need it, you do not need it.

Carbon fibre gives stiffness and dimensional stability, not impact resistance. And it eats brass nozzles: you need a hardened steel one, which is a cost that does not show up in the table above.

The rule that works: choose the material for what the part has to withstand, then look at how much the cost rises, and you will nearly always find it rises less than you feared.

Do it with your own figures

Two steps, and the second is the one almost nobody gets right.

One. Get the volume of your part, not the grams. Your slicer gives it to you; if you only have the grams, divide them by the density of the material you measured them in.

Two. Multiply that volume by the density of the new material and put those grams into the cost calculator, picking the material in the dropdown so it takes its reference price.

If you skip the second step and compare the same grams, the comparison comes out wrong: you will be measuring a bigger part against a smaller one.

The densities and price ranges of the ten materials are in the density and price guide. And if what you want to know is how many metres are left on a spool, that is in how long a 1 kg spool lasts.

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