How to calculate the real profit on a 3D print
By an Etsy seller with 3,000+ sales
The profit on a print is what the buyer paid, minus the fees the platform actually charged on that order, minus what it cost you to make and ship it. The formula is one line. The work is in the word actually: pricing uses estimates, but profit has to use the numbers that really happened, and for most sellers the gap between the two is the difference between a shop that feels profitable and one that is.
By Sean, who runs Opus Design Company on Etsy: five years, 3,000+ sales. Last revised October 2, 2026.
What is the difference between revenue and net profit?
Revenue is what buyers paid; net profit is what is left after the platform’s fees and your costs. “I sold $3,000 this month” is gross revenue. It is the number Etsy’s dashboard shows and the one people quote, and it says nothing about whether the month made money. Net profit is what is left after fees and costs, and the version that tells you what to do next is net profit per order, added up per product. A month can be net positive while two of your products lose money on every sale; you cannot see that from the monthly total.
This page is about the after-the-sale number. If you are still deciding what to charge, start with how to price your prints; the two use the same cost lines but different fee numbers.
How do you calculate the profit on one order?
Rebuild the order line by line from the payment account: what the buyer paid, minus each fee Etsy posted, minus the label and the cost to make and pack. The ledger is the only trustworthy source for an order’s fees. On Etsy that is the payment account, downloadable as a monthly CSV, and the same entries are what Etsy’s API returns as payment account ledger entries.
| Line | Amount | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Item price | $24.00 | Order |
| Buyer-paid shipping | $4.50 | Order. Revenue, but not yours to keep |
| Transaction fee | −$1.85 | Ledger. 6.5% of $28.50, because it applies to shipping too (Etsy’s fee policy) |
| Payment processing | −$1.11 | Ledger. 3% of $28.50 plus $0.25 |
| Listing fee | −$0.20 | Ledger |
| Shipping label | −$4.95 | Your label purchase |
| Cost to make and pack | −$3.40 | Your cost model (filament, printer time, failure share, packaging, and paid help if you have any) |
| Net profit on this order | $16.99 | 71% of the item price, 60% of what the buyer paid |
Two things in that table trip people up. The buyer’s $4.50 for shipping counts as revenue and the fees are charged on it, but the label cost $4.95, so shipping was a small loss rather than income. And the fee lines came from the ledger; if that order had been attributed to an Offsite Ad, a fourth fee line of $4.28 would sit there and the profit would be $12.71. The Etsy fees page explains each line and why the ledger and a calculator can disagree.
Costs that don’t belong to any one order
The “cost to make and pack” line hides a decision. Some costs arrive per print: this order’s filament, the hour you paid someone to finish it. Others arrive in lumps: a failed print on Tuesday that belonged to no order, a case of 200 mailers, the electricity bill. Profit per order only works if the lumps are turned into rates and spread across the prints they support.
- Failed and prototype prints become a failure-rate multiplier on the product they were attempts at. A product that fails one in ten carries 11% extra material and machine cost on every success. Log the failures, or the multiplier is a guess.
- Packaging bought in bulk becomes a per-unit cost: $56 for 200 mailers is $0.28 each.
- Electricity and machine wear become a per-hour rate applied to each print’s hours. Your rate per kWh is on the power bill; EIA publishes the average by state if you want a check.
- Overhead that fits none of those (a subscription, a table at a market) is a monthly line on the P&L, not smeared across orders.
Profit per product, and the bundle trap
Once every order has a real profit figure, sort by product. Two products with the same sales count can have opposite margins once packaging and labor are in, and the one that “sells great” is sometimes the one losing money on each sale. Bundles are the usual hiding place: a three-piece set sold at a discount costs three prints, three finishing passes, and a bigger box, and it is common to find that it nets less than one of its parts sold alone.
Look at profit per product for the month and for the last few months. Prune or reprice the bottom of the list.
How do you calculate monthly profit?
Revenue, minus the fees actually charged, minus cost of goods (the per-order costs added up), minus the overhead lines, equals net profit for the month. Compare it to last month and to the same month last year if you have it. Two rules keep it honest: count revenue when the order was paid, not when it was listed or shipped, and subtract refunds and cancellations in the month they happened.
Common mistakes
- Using the rate card to compute realized profit. A calculator estimate is for pricing. After the sale, use the ledger.
- Treating shipping income as profit and never subtracting the label.
- Counting the listed price when a coupon or sale price was applied.
- Ignoring refunds because they are annoying to enter.
- Never logging failed prints, so material spend and sales never reconcile and every product looks better than it is.
- Looking only at the monthly total and missing the two products dragging it down.
Can you track 3D print profit in a spreadsheet?
Yes, under roughly twenty orders a month: a spreadsheet with one row per order works, and it is worth doing by hand at least once so you understand your own numbers. The step that breaks it is the fee lines. To get them you download the payment account CSV, match its rows to orders, and type the amounts in, every month, for every order. Almost everyone stops by the second month and goes back to estimates, at which point the sheet can price a print but can’t tell you what one made.
That step is what SpoolPilot automates. Link an Etsy shop with read-only access and the app pulls in your orders, back through your full history if you want it, then attaches to each one the fee lines Etsy posted for it in the payment ledger, read directly through Etsy’s API rather than estimated from the rate card. Etsy grants that kind of API access only after reviewing an app; SpoolPilot holds it, and most tools that advertise “real profit” do not, so check which kind you are looking at.
With a cost recipe on each product, every order shows an itemized figure like the table above. If the money on an order doesn’t add up to Etsy’s total, the app says so and marks the figure as an estimate rather than showing a confident wrong number.
The free tier includes ten synced orders a month, each with its real fees and what you kept. Profit per product, the monthly P&L, and every order past ten are Pro. Market and in-person sales are logged by hand in two taps and get the same treatment. If you are weighing it against a spreadsheet or another tool, the software guide lays out the options and covers everything a shop tracks.
See the real profit on every order
SpoolPilot reads the fees Etsy actually charged on each synced order and subtracts your real cost of goods. Free for iPhone, with profit on 10 synced orders a month; every order and the P&L are part of Pro.
Download SpoolPilot on the App Store
Want the estimate first? The free calculator shows what a sale at a given price nets after fees.
More: how to price your prints · Etsy fees for 3D print sellers · why Etsy takes more than the rate card says · tracking filament inventory · what software a 3D printing business needs