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Resin printing cost calculator

Punch in your bottle price and model weight. The calculator works out your real cost per usable miniature, including the resin you waste on failures, the consumables you burn through each session, and the capital cost of your printer spread across the year.

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What you actually pay per bottle, in US dollars.

Most bottles are 1000g. Some are 500g. Check the label.

Pull this from your slicer. A 28mm infantry model runs 5 to 8 grams.

Supports add resin on top of the model itself. 30% is the working figure.

10% is the steady-state figure once you have calibrated. Use 30 to 40% if you are in your first month.

How many usable miniatures you want at the end.

How the maths works

Four cost buckets sit between you and a usable painted model: the resin itself, the failed prints, the consumables you burn through each session, and the capital cost of the printer spread across everything it produces. Most cost discussions count the first bucket and wave their hands at the other three.

Resin per gram is straightforward: bottle price divided by bottle size in grams. A $40 bottle of 1000g resin works out to 4 cents per gram.

Resin per usable model is the obvious model weight, plus the support overhead, divided by the success rate. A 6g model with 30% supports and a 10% failure rate consumes 6 × 1.3 ÷ 0.9 = 8.7g of resin per usable model.

Consumables add roughly $1 per model on a typical batch of around ten to twelve. Wash solution, FEP film, gloves, paper towels.

Capital amortisation spreads the cost of the printer, the wash and cure station, and the early-ownership learning waste across the models they produce. Year one carries this load. Year two, the printer is paid off and capital cost drops to near zero.

The full breakdown of each bucket sits in the real cost of resin printing miniatures, which is the article this calculator pairs with. Read that for the working figures and where they come from.

Where the cost can spike

The defaults in this calculator assume mid-tier resin at $40 per kg and a steady-state failure rate of 10%. Three things push the real number higher.

Speciality resin. Premium resins formulated for fine miniature detail run $50 to $60 per kg. Bump the bottle price and the maths follows.

First-month failure rate. If you are still calibrating, the realistic failure rate is 30 to 40%. Set it that high in the calculator for honest year-one figures, then drop it back as you find your settings.

Scale. A 75mm dragon or large vehicle uses 80 to 120g rather than 6g. At 4 cents per gram, that is $3 to $5 in resin for one model. Worth checking before you print a fleet.