Please add a comprehensive cost and pricing calculator to Bambu Studio that uses sliced filament consumption and estimated print duration to calculate both production cost and a suggested selling price.
The calculator should include:
Filament cost per kilogram for each material, including supports, brims, purging, and prime towers.
Electricity cost based on a configurable local tariff and estimated or user-measured average power consumption.
Printer depreciation and maintenance costs per printing hour.
Separate labor rates and estimated hands-on time for preparation, support removal, sanding, painting, assembly, and packaging.
Additional materials, packaging, overhead, and selling fees.
An adjustable allowance for failed or canceled prints, defaulting to 10%.
A configurable profit margin or markup, with the difference clearly labeled, and a minimum order charge.
After slicing, users should see an itemized cost breakdown, total production cost, cost per item, suggested selling price, and estimated profit.
Please support saved pricing profiles, selectable currency, multi-item and batch pricing, and exporting a customer quotation. Manually entered estimates should be clearly distinguished from slicer calculations or measured data.
License cost, if you pay per print - not so common these days, but some niche communities like 3d printed Nerf still use it. (No, I don’t know how they keep count; I know companies like AKBM pay per print somehow to the designer, and other people just say buy the file once per print). Can count it as overhead, but it should be a separate category.
EDIT I don’t know how Bambu Studio exposes the costs, but it should be possible to OCR most it off the slicing screenshot if they don’t have an easier way built in. You’d need to figure in post-processing like support removal and painting separately. But to be honest, those are such huge costs compared to the print, it’s going to be highly custom for your workflow. It can take a day to sand a helmet smooth.
Studio already does this. The filament profile has a cost field, and the calculation is based on total filament used for the job.
As for the rest…if you’re running a print farm at the level where these minute details matter, you probably should be running print farm management software instead, and all this stuff makes a lot more sense there, not in the slicer.
Separating production costs from profit would make this feature really useful. Electricity, failed prints, and labor can add up quickly. A profit percentage calculator can also help makers work out their selling prices.