Slice each quantity separately
Create one-, five- and ten-part plates, or choose the quantities that fit your product. Record each plate’s own time and filament use. Packing extra copies can change travel, supports, purge and failure exposure, so multiplying a one-part estimate is only a rough hypothesis.
Enter total hours for the plate, not hours per part. The calculator divides plate costs by the entered successful quantity. Entering a per-part time and then dividing again would make a larger batch look artificially cheap.
Separate shared work from per-item work
Setup is entered as minutes for one attempt at a plate. It is spread across that plate’s good parts. Finishing minutes and packaging costs are entered per successful part because removing supports, inspecting or bagging another item usually creates another task.
Machine wear is a cost allocation per printing hour. Keep electricity and labor out of that figure when you also enter them on their own lines. Set any unused cost category to zero rather than silently counting it twice.
A low unit cost is not a production schedule
The ranking identifies the lowest modeled cost per good part among the values you supplied. It does not estimate customer demand, time in the production queue, missed deadlines or the value of unsold inventory.
Expected machine time includes modeled failed printing time. It excludes setup, post-processing and delivery, so do not give it to a customer as a promised shipping date. Choose a batch that also fits your order quantity and delivery window.
Check the failure assumption
This version treats a failed attempt as a failed whole plate. That can fit a detached print that ruins a plate, but not a plate where nine of ten parts succeed. If partial failures dominate your workflow, the result is an approximation.
Use production records to replace sample failure and resource-use values. A larger plate may have a different risk; the current comparison uses one shared failure setting. Compare sensitivity by changing that setting and saving separate quotes. Do not treat the example’s lowest cost as a recommendation to manufacture stock.