💶 Costs
Knowing what it costs to print a piece is harder than it looks. Almost everyone looks at the grams of filament and stops there, and that's precisely the mistake: the material is usually the small part. The rent, the electricity, the printers being written off, the accountant… you're paying for all that too, and somebody has to pass it on.
The Costs section exists for that. It's inside Settings and only users with the Owner or Admin role can see it.
It applies to your pieces. The cost per hour that comes out here is the one used on every piece you create. Pieces you already had don't change on their own — they store the cost they were calculated with — and in Summary there's a button to bring them up to date whenever you want.
The idea in one sentence
You divide your monthly expenses across the hours you actually print, and that tells you what each hour of printer time costs you. Then you add the material, the finish and the extra costs (packaging, hardware…) to that hour, and you have the cost of the piece.
How it's organized
In the Settings menu, the Costs group has four sections:
| Section | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Summary | The state of your catalog (what's waiting to be recalculated) and an example with your numbers. |
| Default values | Margins, the price of each material type, finishes and extra costs. |
| Hourly cost | The cost-per-hour calculation, in three tabs: Print hours, Base cost and Total cost. |
| Farm comparator | A simulator to see what would happen to your cost per hour at a different scale. |
Remember to save. In Default values and in the Print hours tab, changes aren't saved on their own: the Save button turns orange as soon as you touch anything. If you try to switch section or close the window with pending changes, the app warns you before you lose them. The Base cost concepts and the Total cost surcharges are saved when you accept the window in which you add or edit them.
Summary
Cost summary
At the top you have the Cost summary block, with four figures: how many Designs you have, how many Pieces, how many are To recalculate and how many Outdated variants there are.
The reason it exists is this: each piece stores the cost per hour it was calculated with. That's deliberate — if your electricity goes up tomorrow and you change the number, you don't want the cost of everything you made last year rewritten automatically. But then you need a way of saying "right, now apply it to everything", and that's the Recalculate button.
- To recalculate counts the pieces that were calculated with a cost per hour different from the current one.
- Outdated variants counts the SKUs whose stored cost no longer matches that of their pieces. It can happen even when all the pieces are up to date: for example, a variant created before its pieces had a cost stores an old cost.
The button is only enabled if there are pending pieces or outdated variants, and clicking it brings both up to date: the cost of the pieces and that of the variants that use them.
Bear in mind what it moves and what it doesn't: recalculating applies the workshop's current cost per hour to the pieces — if you had typed the Cost/h by hand on any of them, it replaces it — and redoes their sums. It doesn't touch each piece's Cost/kg: if you've changed the price of a material, that's adjusted from the piece itself.
If you only want to fix one variant, you can also do it from the product itself: under that variant's Cost field there's a Sync link. It's explained in Products and Variants.
It doesn't touch any sale price. The cost and the suggested price are updated; the price you set stays as it is. What you'll see move is the margin indicator, which is exactly what you want to look at after changing your costs.
Example
Below, the Example block takes a sample plate and shows you the full calculation with your values: how much is material, how much is printing, how much is finish and how much is extra costs, the Build plate cost, how many pieces come out of that plate and the Piece cost that results from splitting it. In Sale price example you see how the margin turns it into a sale price.
If it comes as a surprise when you look at it, it's usually the good kind: printing almost always weighs far more than material, and that's exactly why this example exists.
Default values
The blocks appear in this order:
Default margins
The Default margin is the one applied when you create a new variant. Red warning below and Orange warning below decide what color the margin field is painted on variants: red below the first, orange between the two and green from the second one up. The three fields follow the order of the bar underneath, which paints those zones and marks where your margin falls; the example line turns the percentages into prices for a piece that costs 10 €. If you haven't changed them, they are 40 %, 50 % and 60 %.
Default material cost
Here you set the reference price for each material type, in euros per kilo. There's one table for Filament and another for Resin, each with the icon the app uses to mark that family everywhere: amber for filament and purple for resin.
Notice that the price is per type, not per family: there's no such thing as "the price of filament", because PLA and TPU don't cost the same. Each type carries its own.
This is only the default price: if the material comes from something you have registered in the inventory with its real cost — a filament spool or a bottle of resin — the inventory cost wins. The table covers the cases where there's nothing from the inventory behind it, for example when you pick a color by hand.
And if a piece carries several colors, the most expensive of them all is used, mixing inventory ones and hand-picked ones without any problem. The idea is not to end up short on cost. It's explained in detail in Pieces → Cost vs. price.
The types listed are the same ones you see when picking a material on a piece, so they aren't created here. If we ever add a new type, it'll appear on its own for you to give it a price. A type whose price you haven't changed uses the indicative price BolloPrint ships with, so even if you never visit this screen the numbers come out reasonable.
Default finishes
The fixed surcharge added to the piece's cost if it's Post-processed or Painted.
Default extra costs
The recommended amount for each extra concept you can add to a piece: Packaging, Labour, Hardware, Inserts and Magnets. For each one you also choose whether it's charged Per unit (once for each piece that comes off the plate) or Per build plate (just once, whether you print them one at a time or twenty at a time).
It's only a recommendation: when you add the concept to a piece, the amount is copied there and stays fixed. Changing these values never touches pieces that already exist.
Watch out with labour. If your payroll is already in Hourly cost, that labour is already spread across all the print hours. Use the extra concept only for work that isn't in there: post-processing, assembly, hand finishing.
Hourly cost
This section has three tabs, which are the three steps of the same calculation.
Print hours
This is the number most people get wrong, and the one that changes the result the most.
It's worked out like this: Printers × Hours / day × Days / month.
Don't put in the theoretical maximum, put in what you actually print. If you have three printers but on average they're working eight hours a day, that's eight, not twenty-four. This number is the divisor: the higher it is, the more your fixed expenses are spread out and the cheaper the hour works out.
The fourth field, Hours / mo, is the result: it's calculated automatically and isn't editable.
Base cost
The Fixed costs block gathers your workshop's expenses, grouped by type: everything is normalised to a monthly cost so it can be divided by the printing hours. Each type asks for what it needs, and some have several modes:
| Type | Modes and what it asks for |
|---|---|
| Fixed cost | Monthly: the amount per month (rent, internet, accountant…). Amortization: what it cost and over how many years you write it off. Per print hour: an amount added to each hour printed. |
| Printer | Amortization: what the printer cost and over how many years you write it off. Per print hour: what it cost and its Working life. |
| Software | Subscription (with a monthly or annual period) or Perpetual licence (what it cost and over how many years you write it off). |
| Payroll | The amount, Monthly or Annual, and the number of Employees, which multiplies it. |
| Electricity | By consumption: the average power in kW × the price per kWh. Fixed monthly: an amount per month. |
There are two ways of passing on an expense, and it's worth not mixing them up:
- Monthly amounts describe the whole workshop: they're added up and spread across your print hours. The rent is entered just once.
- Per-hour modes (Fixed cost or Printers Per print hour, and Electricity By consumption) are added directly to each hour printed, so they describe a single printer: enter the consumption or cost of an average machine, not that of the whole farm.
And don't enter the same expense both ways, or you'll count it twice. The app reminds you when you choose a per-hour mode.
Right at the bottom you see the sum worked out: monthly expenses ÷ print hours + per-hour amounts = base cost per hour.
Total cost
The base cost is what an hour costs you "clean". But there are things you know happen and that don't come with a fixed invoice: nozzles break, the odd piece comes out wrong and has to be reprinted, and then there are taxes.
That's what the surcharges are for: percentages on the base cost. The typical ones are maintenance, failure rate, contingencies and income tax. The result is the total cost per hour, which is your real number.
Each surcharge is calculated on the base cost, and then they're all added together. They aren't applied on top of one another: 1% of maintenance is worth the same wherever it sits in the list, so the order doesn't matter and you can move them around without fear of the total changing.
The table shows the whole calculation so you can check it by hand. Each row carries its percentage, the base cost it's applied to — the same on every row — and the extra cost it contributes. At the bottom, the sum.
The profit margin doesn't go here. That's applied on the product variant, because it's a commercial decision, not a cost.
Farm comparator
A simulator for answering the million-dollar question: should I buy another printer? It starts from the concepts and surcharges you have configured and only moves the hours; it doesn't change anything in your settings. It has three views:
- Curve — you pick a variable (printers, hours a day or days a month) and see how the cost per hour falls, with your current situation marked.
- Scenario — your setup today against a scenario you adjust, with the difference as a percentage and in euros per piece.
- Matrix — every combination of printers and hours at a glance, color-coded.
There's something the curve shows very well and is worth understanding: at some point it stops falling. Going from one printer to five divides the cost per hour by almost five, but going from twenty to a hundred barely moves it. The reason is that expenses charged per hour printed — such as electricity by consumption — aren't spread out: they're paid for every hour, so they set a floor you won't get below however much you grow.