Should I buy a 3D printer or order the parts?
The full sum of owning a printer — machine, material, failures and your time — against ordering, and the parts-per-year figure where the answer flips.
We are a print shop, so this article runs against our short-term interest. We are writing it anyway, because half the people who ask us this should buy a printer, and would save money and frustration knowing it sooner.
The sum almost nobody does in full
The price of the machine is the visible part and the least important. A decent printer today costs less than a good phone. What people leave out is everything else.
- Material. Spools, and spools in more than one colour, and spools that absorb damp if you do not store them properly.
- Consumables. Nozzles that wear, build plates, belts, a fan when its turn comes.
- The early failures. Everybody goes through a phase of lifted parts and spaghetti. It is material, electricity and time, and it is unavoidable.
- Your time. Learning the slicer, orienting, calibrating, cleaning the plate, removing supports. It is the most expensive item of all and the only one nobody writes down.
- The space. A printer makes noise, smells depending on the material and takes up a table. In a small flat that is not a detail.
Buy a printer if…
- 1You will print more than once a month, consistently. Below that, the machine spends its life switched off and you forget everything between sessions.
- 2The process interests you. If you enjoy working out why a part failed, a printer is an excellent hobby and a service cannot give you that.
- 3You iterate a lot and fast. Ten versions of a shape in a week is precisely what having the machine beside you is for.
- 4The parts are small, in PLA and undemanding. The easiest case, and the one where a service adds least over the effort of ordering.
Order instead if…
- 1You need one part, once. Buying a machine for one spare is like buying a lathe to make one screw.
- 2There is a deadline. A new printer and a Thursday delivery is a combination that goes wrong with remarkable regularity.
- 3The part needs something a home machine does not give: ABS without cracking, fine-detail resin, flexible TPU, or more than 25 cm.
- 4Your hour is worth more than the part. If you are a professional, four hours wrestling with a slicer costs more than the whole order.
- 5You need the same part again in a year, identical, with an invoice. That is a process, not a gadget.
The crossover, in numbers
Rounding heavily: below five or six small parts a year, ordering is cheaper on money alone, and vastly cheaper once you count your time. Between six and twenty a year it evens out and everything else decides — deadlines, materials, whether you enjoy it. Above that, and as long as the parts are simple, owning the machine wins. A service still makes sense past that threshold only for what your machine cannot do: difficult materials, size, production runs and deliveries that cannot afford a failure.
What does it cost to run a 3D printer for a year?
Between material, consumables and electricity, moderate home use runs to a couple of spools and the odd replacement part. The item that genuinely dominates appears on no invoice: the hours you put in, and how many that is depends mostly on how fussy you are about the result.
I own a printer but this part will not come out. Can you print it?
Yes, and it is a regular job: parts too big to fit, materials an open machine handles badly, or a part that has to come out right first time. Tell us what you tried and what failed; it saves time and usually points straight at orientation or material.
For a company, does bringing printing in-house pay?
Past a steady volume, yes, but the sum is not the machine: it is the person. A printer without somebody who knows it produces failed parts and missed dates. What usually works is starting outside, measuring how much actually gets printed over six months, and deciding on that figure rather than on the forecast.