PLA vs PETG vs ABS: Cost and Performance Comparison

Look at spool prices alone and PLA, PETG, and ABS all sit in roughly the same $15–28/kg range. Which is exactly why so many people assume the finished part costs about the same too — and then get surprised when an ABS print farm's electricity bill looks nothing like a PLA one.

The spool price is the smallest piece of the real cost. Here's the rest of it.

The headline numbers

Where ABS actually costs you money

Three things that never show up on the spool's price tag:

Electricity. PLA's bed sits at 55°C and barely sips power. ABS needs 100–110°C, which means the heater is cycling almost constantly — and if the printer is enclosed, it's also fighting to keep the chamber warm. Same print, same printer, and ABS pulls 20–40% more electricity than PLA, purely from keeping that bed hot. Measured with a plug-in power meter, a typical mid-size FDM printer averages around 100–130 W printing PLA and 150–200 W printing ABS.

Failed prints. ABS shrinks about 0.8–1.5% as it cools, and that contraction is exactly what causes warping, corner lifting, and layer splitting on an open-frame printer. If one in five ABS prints fails, your real material cost for that job just went up 25%, whether or not you remembered to price for it. PLA, by comparison, almost never fails for this reason — its shrinkage is negligible and it's happy printing onto a barely warm bed.

Ventilation. ABS releases styrene fumes that you genuinely don't want to breathe for hours at a time. Doing it safely means an enclosure with carbon filtration or an exhaust system — consumables and hardware that PLA never asks for. Carbon filter cartridges are a small but recurring line item ($10–30 every few months of heavy printing), and they belong in your hourly machine cost.

A worked example: the same part in all three materials

Let's make this concrete. Take a 100 g functional bracket, 8 hours of print time, electricity at $0.15/kWh, and a $20/kg spool for all three materials (close enough for standard lines).

PLA:

• Material: 100 g × $0.020/g = $2.00
• Electricity: 8 h × 0.11 kW × $0.15 = $0.13
• Failure buffer at 5%: (2.00 + 0.13) × 0.05 = $0.11
• Real cost: ≈ $2.24

PETG:

• Material: 100 g × $0.022/g = $2.20
• Electricity: 8 h × 0.13 kW × $0.15 = $0.16
• Failure buffer at 10%: $0.24
• Real cost: ≈ $2.60

ABS:

• Material: 100 g × $0.020/g = $2.00
• Electricity: 8 h × 0.18 kW × $0.15 = $0.22
• Failure buffer at 25%: $0.56
• Ventilation/filter share: ≈ $0.10
• Real cost: ≈ $2.88

Same spool price, same part — and ABS quietly costs about 30% more than PLA per finished piece. Scale that to a print farm running thousands of parts a year and the "identical" materials are separated by real money: on 5,000 parts, that 30% gap is over $3,000 annually.

Is the extra cost worth it?

Depends entirely on what the part has to survive.

PLA is stiff, detailed, and dead simple to print — and it goes soft at 55°C. Leave one on a car dashboard in summer and watch it slump. It's also the most brittle of the three: fine for figurines and prototypes, wrong for anything that takes repeated impacts or sustained load.

PETG is the middle ground that actually earns its place: good impact resistance, decent chemical resistance, holds up to about 75°C, slightly flexible rather than shattering, and doesn't need an enclosure. It's also naturally water-resistant, which makes it the default for outdoor and garden parts. The tradeoff is stringing — PETG loves to leave fine wisps between features, which costs you a little cleanup time per part, and that's labor you should price.

ABS is genuinely tough and heat-resistant to 95°C, and it's the one material here you can vapor-smooth with acetone for an injection-molded look. It machines, sands, and glues beautifully. But you're paying for that in electricity, ventilation, and failed prints the whole way through — and unless you have an enclosed printer, your effective failure rate makes most quotes uncompetitive.

Print speed and throughput — the fourth hidden factor

Cost per part isn't only materials and power; it's machine-hours. PLA tolerates aggressive speeds and cooling, so modern printers hit their fastest profiles with it. PETG wants slower speeds and less cooling to avoid stringing and adhesion issues, typically stretching print times 10–20% over PLA. ABS prints at moderate speeds but often needs a brim, a heated soak, and chamber stabilization time. If your depreciation is $0.15–0.30 per machine-hour, a 20% longer print is another cost line that never appears on the spool.

The actual decision

Pick PLA unless you have a specific reason not to — it's cheapest to run, fastest to print, and almost never fails. Move to PETG the moment a part needs to survive outdoors, take an impact, or touch hot-ish environments. Reach for ABS only when heat resistance above 75°C, acetone smoothing, or its machinability is a hard requirement — and price in the electricity, the failure rate, and the ventilation honestly.

The 3D Costify calculator has presets for all three materials' energy profiles built in, so you can compare the real cost side by side instead of estimating it. Try it here.