The short answer
Quote a lead time you can hit 95% of the time, not your best case. Build it from three numbers: how many printer-hours a day you really have, how deep the queue is right now, and how long handling takes after the print finishes. Then offer a faster tier at a multiplier, because the customer buying speed is buying queue position from everyone else.
Print time is a fraction of lead time
The slicer's estimate covers one step. The order's clock includes all of these:
- Queue - the wait for a free machine. Usually the largest term, and the only one that changes hour to hour.
- Plating - batching parts onto a build plate. It lifts your margin, and it delays individual jobs for exactly that reason: you're waiting for the plate to fill.
- The print - plus the reprint, sometimes. Build a failure rate into the promise, not just into the price.
- Post-processing - support removal, sanding, gluing, assembly. Resin adds a mandatory wash and cure that FDM doesn't have.
- Checks and packing - measuring critical dimensions, photographing, boxing.
- Carrier cut-off - finishing at 18:05 for a 18:00 pickup costs a full day.
Shops that quote print time as lead time miss deadlines constantly and never work out why. The gap is not slippage, it is arithmetic.
Building the number
1. Real daily capacity
Not printers × 24. Take the hours a machine actually runs unattended in your setup - overnight counts, an unsupervised eight-hour print while you're out does not if you won't start one - and multiply by machine count. Then cut it by your failure rate. Three printers at 16 usable hours with 10% failures is about 3 × 16 × 0.9 = 43 productive printer-hours a day.
2. Current queue depth
Sum the estimated print hours of everything accepted and unstarted. Divide by daily capacity to get days of backlog. A 60-hour queue against 43 hours a day is 1.4 days before a new job even begins.
3. Handling time
Measure it once, honestly, on ten real orders: from print complete to parcel sealed. Most shops land somewhere between 15 minutes and an hour per order, and it belongs in your cost calculation as much as in your lead time.
promise = queue‑days + print‑days + handling + buffer
buffer ≈ 1 day, or 20% - whichever is larger
Tiers customers understand
Three options is the sweet spot. More than that and people stop reading; fewer and you lose the upsell. A common structure:
| Tier | Promise | Typical uplift | What you're really selling |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | 3–5 business days | - | Your normal queue, batched efficiently |
| Priority | 2 business days | +25–50% | Front of queue, still batched |
| Rush | Next business day | +50–100% | Its own plate, displacing other jobs |
The uplift is a multiplier on the job, not a flat fee, because a rush on a 20-hour print consumes far more of your capacity than a rush on a 2-hour print. Price the disruption, not the envelope.
Calibrating the premium
Two signals tell you it's wrong. If nobody ever picks the fast tier, it's too expensive - drop it and watch. If nearly everybody picks it, you've mispriced your standard tier's promise, and the fix is usually to make standard honest rather than to raise rush. A healthy split for most shops is a minority on the paid tiers, with those orders carrying a visibly better margin.
Publishing it without getting burned
- Separate production from transit. "Dispatched in 2 business days, delivered in 3–5" is two promises, only one of which is yours.
- Say "business days" and mean it. Then state your cut-off time and your closure days.
- Put the promise on the quote, the confirmation and the order. If it only exists on a shipping page, it isn't part of the agreement.
- Write the slip clause into your terms. What happens on a failed print, a file you can't produce, a material out of stock.
- Flag the outliers before you accept them. A 40-hour print or a 900 g part shouldn't silently join a two-day queue - that's exactly the case for an approval step, as covered in quoting B2B and bulk work.
Sell turnaround at the quote
Filaquote lets you define turnaround options with their own price multipliers, so the customer picks Standard, Priority or Rush while they're looking at the price - and the uplift is applied to the geometry-derived total automatically instead of being negotiated by email.
Add to Shopify→FAQ
How long does a 3D printing order take?
The print itself is usually hours; the order is usually days. Most of the elapsed time is queue - waiting for a free printer - plus post-processing, quality checks, packing and the carrier's own clock. A single small part from a shop with spare capacity can ship the same day; the same part behind a full queue is a three to five day job.
How much should I charge for rush 3D printing?
A multiplier on the whole job rather than a flat fee, because what the customer is buying is queue position and that displaces other work. Uplifts in the range of 25 to 100 percent are common, scaled to how far you compress the promise. If nobody ever takes your rush option it is priced too high, and if everybody does it is priced too low.
Should my lead time include shipping?
Quote them separately and add them visibly. Say dispatched in two business days, then three to five days in transit, so a delay you did not cause is not read as a promise you broke. Customers hear one number when you give them one number, and that number is the delivery date.
What should I do when I am going to miss a lead time?
Tell them before the deadline passes, not after. A message on day two saying the part failed and is reprinting costs you nothing; silence until day six costs you the customer. Offer a specific new date and, if it is your fault, refund the rush premium.