What a 3D Printed Secret Santa Really Costs: Six Small Gifts, Priced Out

Christmas is 52 days away, and somewhere in your office there is a Secret Santa with a 15 dollar limit and your name on a slip of paper. A 3D printed gift is a lovely answer to that, provided you know what it costs in plastic and in hours before you promise it to anyone. I once promised four of something, and the something took an afternoon each. Let's do the sums first this time, so you can sleep soundly after you print.

Key takeaways

• Four of the gifts below, two cookie cutters and two Minecraft-style keychain figures, weigh 81 g of filament in total and take about 4 hours 18 minutes to print.
• At a filament price of 20 dollars per kg (my assumption, swap in your own), those four gifts cost about 1.62 dollars in plastic.
• OogiMe's Snowman Cookie Cutter on Thingiverse is listed at roughly 55 minutes and 20 g, and the Gingerbread Cookie Cutter at roughly 55 minutes and 17 g.
• chiz_m's Creeper and Skeleton keychain kits on MakerWorld print in 59 minutes (17 g) and 1 hour 29 minutes (27 g), and are designed for multi-colour printing.
• Both cookie cutter and keychain listings use non-commercial licences, so they are fine for gifts and not for a market stall.

The three numbers that decide whether a gift is realistic

Before choosing a model, I check three things: grams of filament, hours of printer time, and whether it fits my bed. The first two feed the print cost calculator, which takes model weight, filament price per kg, print time, printer power draw, electricity price and a failure buffer, then splits the total into filament, electricity and buffer. The third is what the bed size checker is for: enter your build volume and the model's dimensions and it tells you whether it fits, the best orientation and the largest scale it can reach.

The plastic is almost always the small part. Time is the real cost, so everything below is chosen because it is quick.

The baker's pair

OogiMe's Snowman Cookie Cutter on Thingiverse prints at 0.3 mm layer height in about 55 minutes using about 20 g.

Their Gingerbread Cookie Cutter is the same recipe: 0.3 mm layers, about 55 minutes, about 17 g.

Wrap one of each with a bag of cookie mix and you have a gift that costs well under a dollar in plastic. A sensible note: if the cutters will touch food regularly, check what your filament and nozzle are rated for and consider a quick wash and a short use rather than treating them as permanent kitchenware.

The pocket-sized pair

chiz_m's Creeper mini figure kit on MakerWorld is a Minecraft-inspired figure with an alternate loop part, so it turns into a keychain. It prints as oriented with no supports, the parts twist off the sprue without cutters, and the listing gives 59 minutes and 17 g. It is designed for multi-colour printing on an AMS.

The Skeleton from the same creator is the bigger sibling at 1 hour 29 minutes and 27 g. The listing warns that it contains small parts, so keep it away from younger children.

The print-it-and-forget-it pair

kasinatorhh's Fidget Gears Revolving V2 on Thingiverse is a print-in-place toy with 57 makes listed. The creator's one tip is to set outer walls before inner walls for good quality. No assembly means you can start it, leave, and come back to a finished gift.

Charlie1982's Origami Carabiner on Thingiverse is a two-part hook and door, printed without supports in PLA or ABS in about 1 hour 40 minutes. Varying the layer height gives it a custom surface texture, a nice touch for a gift tag to mention.

I did not find weights listed for these two, so run them through your slicer before you price them.

Pricing the batch

Here is the worked example for the four models with listed numbers. Assuming 20 dollars per kg:

• Snowman cutter: 20 g, about 0.40 dollars
• Gingerbread cutter: 17 g, about 0.34 dollars
• Creeper keychain: 17 g, about 0.34 dollars
• Skeleton keychain: 27 g, about 0.54 dollars

That is 81 g and about 1.62 dollars of filament across roughly 4 hours 18 minutes of printing, before electricity and the failure buffer the calculator adds on top. Even with a generous buffer, you are well inside a Secret Santa limit, and the clock is what to plan around: a few evenings of printing, not a few minutes.

Plan backwards from the day

Start with the multi-colour keychains, since they need the most attention. Put the cookie cutters on a second plate, since they are flat and forgiving. Check the bed size for anything you plan to scale up. For more seasonal ideas, the winter holidays collection is the place to browse.

The free Thinger app lets you search over 600,000 free models across every major platform, handy when the person on your slip turns out to like something I did not cover. If your first gift disappoints, you may just have to try, try, and try again, which is also a fair description of print farm life.