SpoolPilot · Guide
What software does a 3D printing business actually need?
By an Etsy seller with 3,000+ sales
Less than the ads suggest, and different from what a normal small business uses. A small shop needs four numbers it can trust: what each print costs, what each sale actually earned after the platform took its cut, how much filament is on the shelf, and which products are worth printing again. Whether that takes a spreadsheet or an app depends mostly on how many orders a month you sell.
By Sean, who runs Opus Design Company on Etsy: five years, 3,000+ sales, a few printers in a spare room. Everything below is what that shop tracks and why. Last revised October 2, 2026.
Why a 3D printing business isn’t a normal small business
Most small-business software assumes you buy finished goods, put them on a shelf, and sell them. A print shop doesn’t work that way. Your inventory is raw material measured by weight, not units. Most products are made after the order arrives, so a “stock count” is often meaningless. Your machines run unattended for hours, which makes time a cost even when you aren’t in the room. And a single product’s cost changes when you change a print setting: a different infill, a different layer height, or a color that needs more purging all move the number.
Then there is the part nobody budgets for: prints that fail. A failed print consumes material and machine time and produces nothing. Generic bookkeeping has no line for that. A shop that doesn’t count it will believe every product is more profitable than it is.
The numbers that decide whether a print made money
These are the inputs, in the order they usually go wrong. Each has a longer guide in the resources section; this page is the map.
Filament and other material
Your slicer already knows the grams for a print. Multiply by what you paid per kilogram and that is your material cost, plus supports, purge towers, and the waste from a color change if you run multi-color. The math is easy. The mistake is using a price per kilo from six months ago, or forgetting that the fancy silk PLA costs twice what the plain roll did. Material is usually the smallest cost on a small print and the largest on a big one, so a shop that sells both needs the real figure for each.
Print time
Print time matters three ways:
- It drives electricity.
- It drives wear on nozzles, belts, and build plates.
- It is capacity: a six-hour print occupies a printer that could have made something else.
With one printer, lost capacity is easy to feel. With four, it is the difference between a product that pays for itself and one that just keeps the machines busy. The slicer reports the time; the discipline is recording it per product rather than guessing later.
Failed and unsold prints
A failure is filament and hours spent with no product to show. A prototype is the same thing on purpose. A calibration cube is a cost of doing business. If none of that is logged, your material spend will never reconcile with your sales, and you will not know which product or which printer is eating the difference. SpoolPilot logs a print as stock, prototype, or failed, and lets you log a scratch print with no product behind it, so the burned spool shows up somewhere.
Electricity and machine cost
Electricity costs less than people expect, but it is not zero. A printer that averages 150 watts over a six-hour print uses about 0.9 kWh. At the June 2026 US residential average of 18.34 cents per kWh (EIA, Electric Power Monthly, table 5.6.A), that print cost about 17 cents to run. Heated beds, enclosures, and dryers push it up; your local rate may be half or double the average. The point is to use a per-hour figure and stop rounding it to nothing.
Machine depreciation is real too: a $600 printer that gives you 3,000 print hours is 20 cents an hour before maintenance. SpoolPilot charges it per print hour as Printer wear: type what one printer cost and the print hours you expect from it in Cost settings, and every price, sale, and report carries its share. Leave it blank and nothing is charged.
Packaging
The box, the mailer, the tape, the insert, the thank-you card. Count the actual box, not a guess. On a $12 item, a $1.40 box and mailer is more than 10% of the sale, which is more than most people’s electricity and material combined on that item. Packaging is the cost small shops most often leave out.
Your time
Removing supports, sanding, inserting magnets, packing, answering the message about whether it comes in blue. If you pay someone for that time, their wage is a cost like the box. If it is your own time, don’t bury it in the cost: your pay is what an order keeps after costs and fees, so divide that by your hands-on minutes and you know what the product pays you an hour. A product can sell well and still pay you $6 an hour. That hourly figure is also the number you can compare across products.
Etsy fees, if you sell on Etsy
Etsy’s published rates (Etsy’s fee policy) are a 6.5% transaction fee on the order total including shipping, payment processing of 3% plus $0.25 in the US, a $0.20 listing fee per item sold, and an Offsite Ads fee of 12% or 15% on orders attributed to those ads. On a $24 order with $4 shipping that is roughly $1.82 + $1.09 + $0.20, about $3.11 before any ad attribution, or about 11% of what the buyer paid. The fees Etsy actually charges in your payment account are often more than the rate card predicts, for reasons that don’t fit a formula. Why Etsy takes more than the rate card says walks through five of them and how to check your own shop in ten minutes.
If you sell at markets or through your own site instead, swap in that platform’s fees or your card-processing rate. The structure is the same; only the percentages change.
Inventory by the spool
Filament inventory is the one place print shops try hardest and get the least back. Weighing every open spool is accurate and nobody keeps it up. The version that still gets done in a busy week is simpler: count sealed spools by scanning the barcode when a box arrives, take a spool off the count when you open it, and let sales pace tell you how many weeks of each material are left. That is what SpoolPilot does, and it is also a perfectly good spreadsheet column if you would rather do it by hand.
Product inventory is the other half. Most 3D-printed products are made to order, and forcing a stock count on them is a false chore. The products worth counting are the ones you print ahead of demand, which is usually your best sellers before a busy season. A print-next queue, ranked by how soon each product runs out at its current sales rate, replaces the whiteboard.
Product-level profitability
Monthly profit tells you whether the shop made money. Product-level profit tells you which products are worth printing again. Two items can sell equally well and one of them can be losing money on every order once packaging is counted, or paying you a fraction of the other for every hour you spend on it. Bundles are the usual hiding place: a three-piece set priced as a discount that costs more to print and pack than its parts sold separately. The only way to see it is to have every cost above attached to every product, and every sale’s real fees attached to every order, so that “profit per product this month” is a number you can sort by rather than a feeling.
Where spreadsheets stop working
A spreadsheet is the right tool at the start. It breaks in a predictable order. First, fees per order: to know the real fee on each sale you have to download the payment account CSV, match its rows to orders, and type them in, and that is the step everyone abandons by the second month. Second, variants and multiple printers: the sheet that priced one product in one color becomes forty rows that nobody trusts. Third, time: the sheet lives on a laptop, and the decisions happen at the printer, at the post office, and at the kitchen table at 11pm. By the time you sit down to update it, you are estimating, and estimates drift in one direction.
Why SpoolPilot runs on your phone
A print shop is run standing up. You notice the spool is low while you are changing it. You want to know whether an order was worth it while you are packing it. You want to price a print while the slicer is open on the screen in front of you. Software that requires walking to a desk gets used on Sundays; software in your pocket gets used when the information is fresh. That is the reason SpoolPilot is an iPhone app that reads the slicer screen with the camera, rather than a web dashboard with a form.
Do you need a spreadsheet, a filament tracker, Etsy analytics, or business management software?
Each of these answers a different question. Pick by the question you have.
| Tool | Answers | Doesn’t answer | Right when |
|---|---|---|---|
| A spreadsheet | Whatever you type into it, including product costs and a monthly total | Real per-order fees without manual CSV work; anything you didn’t sit down to enter | You are under roughly 20 orders a month and enjoy the sheet |
| A filament tracker (Spoolman and the many mobile apps like it) | How many grams are left on each spool, often to the gram | What anything cost or earned; it has no concept of a sale | You care about material precisely and money is handled elsewhere. See Spoolman vs SpoolPilot |
| Etsy’s own stats and payment account | Views, orders, revenue, and the fee lines Etsy charged, one order at a time | Your cost of goods, so it never shows profit; nothing about material or printers | Always worth reading; it is the source of truth for fees |
| A print-farm manager (Bambu’s farm tools, SimplyPrint, and similar) | Which printer is running what, queues, remote monitoring | Money: no fees, costs or profit | You have enough printers that dispatching jobs is the bottleneck |
| A cost calculator (3DPCC and similar) | What a print should sell for, before you list it | What it actually earned after it sold; usually no shop connection | You mostly quote custom work. See 3DPCC vs SpoolPilot |
| Generic handmade bookkeeping (Stocksmith, formerly Craftybase) | Inventory, COGS, and reports for any handmade business, on the desktop | Spools, grams, print hours, or slicers; you model materials as generic components | You run a multi-product handmade business where 3D printing is one line. See the Craftybase comparison |
| 3D printing business software (SpoolPilot) | Cost per print from the slicer, real fees per order from Etsy’s ledger, profit per product, spool counts, and what to print next | Printer control, tax and VAT, shipping-label cost, anything outside Etsy sync and manual sales | You sell prints regularly and want the profit on each one without the spreadsheet |
Competitor descriptions are from each product’s own website or App Store listing, checked September 2026; check current features before choosing. Spoolman is an open-source project by its respective authors. 3DPCC, SimplyPrint, Stocksmith, Craftybase, and Bambu Lab are trademarks of their respective owners. SpoolPilot is not affiliated with any of them.
A decision path
The table above sorts by tool. This one sorts by shop: find the row that sounds like yours.
| If this is you | Use | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Printing for yourself, no sales | A filament tracker, or nothing | There is no profit to compute |
| Selling occasionally, under about 20 orders a month | A spreadsheet plus a free pricing calculator | The fee lines are still copyable by hand, and you learn your numbers |
| Selling steadily on Etsy, want profit per order without the CSV chore | 3D print business software | Reading the ledger is the part a sheet can’t sustain |
| Custom quotes are most of the work | A pricing calculator with quote tracking | Quoting, not reconciling, is the daily job |
| Many products across several handmade lines, 3D printing is one | Generic handmade bookkeeping | You need the breadth more than spool-level detail |
| Six or more printers and dispatching jobs is the bottleneck | A print-farm manager, alongside whatever handles money | Machine control is a separate problem |
Combinations that work
Most small shops end up with two tools, not one. Spoolman for gram-level material detail plus something that knows your sales for the money. A farm manager for the printers plus anything from the tables above for profit. Etsy’s own stats for traffic plus a tool that reads the ledger for fees. The mistake is expecting one product to do all of it; the second mistake is paying for two that answer the same question.
Where SpoolPilot fits
SpoolPilot is an iPhone app for people who sell what they print. It does the four things at the top of this page and stops there. If you are choosing between it and a spreadsheet or another tool, the decision path above is the short version of this section.
- Cost per print. Point the camera at Bambu Studio, OrcaSlicer, PrusaSlicer, or Cura and it reads the print time and grams off the screen. Your filament price, electricity, and packaging are applied, and you get the cost, a price that hits the margin you want after fees, and what that price pays you an hour.
- Real profit per order. Connect an Etsy shop (read-only) and it imports your sales, including full history, and reads the fee entries Etsy actually charged on each order directly from your payment ledger through Etsy’s API, rather than estimating them from the rate card. Etsy grants that access only after reviewing an app, and SpoolPilot holds it; many tools that promise real profit are estimating. When an order’s money doesn’t reconcile to Etsy’s total, it says so and labels the estimate.
- Filament on the shelf. Sealed spools counted by barcode scan, weeks of stock from your real sales pace, and a low-stock nudge that only fires for materials you actually sell through.
- Products and what to print next. Made-to-order by default, stock tracking where you want it, bundles assembled from parts, and a print-next queue ranked by how soon each product runs out.
- Sales without a shop connection. Log a market or in-person sale in two taps and every number still works from what you enter.
- Private by design. Your data lives on your phone and your own iCloud. There is no account and no analytics inside the app.
What it doesn’t do
It runs on iPhone only; there is no Android or web version (an Android interest list is on the calculator page). Sales sync is Etsy only today; other platforms are entered by hand. It does not control printers or route jobs, does not handle tax or VAT. Postage is counted only on free-shipping orders, at a typical label cost you set, not the exact label you bought. If any of those is the thing you need most, one of the tools in the table above is the better pick.
What you can do for free
The download is free and the free tier is not a demo. Filament inventory with barcode scanning, the pricing calculator with estimated fees, manual sales, and the full product and cost model are free with no limit. Slicer scanning is free for the first three scans. An Etsy connection imports up to ten orders a month for free, and each one shows the exact fees Etsy charged and what you kept after costs.
What Pro adds
SpoolPilot Pro is $12.99 a month or $99.99 a year, with a 7-day free trial on the yearly plan. It takes the ten-order limit off, so every order comes in with its real fees, back through your whole history. It adds the full profit-and-loss by month and by product, profit per print hour, the open orders you still have to print, weeks-of-stock forecasts for filament and products, purchased parts costed into each product, when you’ll need another printer, and unlimited slicer scans. The free tier stays free.
Start with the number you don’t have yet
If you have never seen your cost per print with fees included, the free calculator will show you in about a minute, no signup. If you already know that and want the profit on every order you sold, that is the app.
Or download SpoolPilot on the App Store, free, with an optional Pro subscription.
More: all resources · why Etsy takes more than the rate card says · free 3D print cost calculator · 3DPCC vs SpoolPilot · Spoolman vs SpoolPilot · a Stocksmith alternative