# 3D Printing > General 3D Printing Discussion >  Price of Resin compared to Filament?

## Solidabble

Does anyone know how much more expensive resin is when compared to Filament?  For example to print a 6" cube, how much more would it cost?  I'm loving the resin printers, but I also love to make prototypes of my designs and remake them over and over again as I improve on them.  Is Resin really a whole lot more expensive?

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## Compro01

A solid 6" cube would have a volume of 3.54 litres.

For resin : 

Makerjuice SubG+ is $45/litre, and the 3.5% shrinkage will require you to print 3.67 litres of resin, so you'd need $165.15 worth to print it.

Makerjuice SubG, which is $40/litre, and the 8% shrinkage will require you to print 3.85 litres of resin, brings the cost down to $154.00.

Formlabs resin is $149/litre, which brings the cost to $527.46.  Price will probably be higher than that due to shrinkage, but Formlabs doesn't seem to specify the resin shrinkage anywhere I can find.

For filament : 

A 1kg spool of 1.75mm PLA is about 330m long, giving a volume of about 800ml, so you'd need 4.4 spools.  Makerbot sells it for $48/spool (ordinary solid colour), so that's $211.20 worth of filament.

A 1kg spool of 1.75mm ABS filament would be about 400m long, giving a volume of 962ml, so you'd need 3.68 spools.  Makerbot sells it for $48/spool also, so that's $176.63.

Pushplastic sells both PLA and ABS for $19/kg, which would cut the costs to $83.60 and $69.91, respectively.

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## Feign

Wow, this really puts things in perspective.  No wonder everything I hear about SLA printing talks about MakerJuice.

Also there's nearly a 200% markup for brand name over generic both with resin and filament?  That seems kinda crazy.

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## KDog

I'm not sure that that is a correct comparison.  Does anybody have any experience printing with a SLA printer?  How much does a liter of the resin actually print?  My guess is that the volume of the polymerized plastic will be greater than the un-polymerized liquid but I'm not sure by much.

How do you care for the liquid?  Will it evaporate?  How much will it polymerize in a sunny room?

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## Compro01

> My guess is that the volume of the polymerized plastic will be greater than the un-polymerized liquid but I'm not sure by much.


Ah, forgot about that.  Makerjuice specifies 8% shinkage for SubG and 3.5% for SubG+.  No such information seems to be available from Formlabs for their resin.

I've edited my post with the adjusted numbers.  Accounting for shrinkage increased the cost of the SubG+ by $6 and the SubG cost by just over $12.

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## Markum_Debreeze

Compro, so according to this, it's not really any cheaper to use Filament over Resin than unless you use Pushplastic?

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## Compro01

> Compro, so according to this, it's not really any cheaper to use Filament over Resin than unless you use Pushplastic?


Or any number of other cheaper providers.  I just used Makerbot as an example of an "official" source and pushplastic as an example of an "alternative" source.  I just used pushplastic for the example because I saw the name in the self-promotion section.  There's lots of other places to buy it from.

Looking on Amazon, I see kilo spools for $30-ish, which is right in the middle between makerbot and pushplastic.

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## AndrewK

Is the MakerJuice resin any good?  Seems like a really good price, but doesn't it cure correctly and do the builds turn out as nice?

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## Compro01

> Is the MakerJuice resin any good?  Seems like a really good price, but doesn't it cure correctly and do the builds turn out as nice?


Anything you see from the peachy printer guys uses makerjuice.

They're also collaborating to make a resin specifically designed for the peachy.

The prints they display on the makerjuce site look pretty nice.

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## Valter

> I'm not sure that that is a correct comparison.  Does anybody have any experience printing with a SLA printer?  How much does a liter of the resin actually print?  My guess is that the volume of the polymerized plastic will be greater than the un-polymerized liquid but I'm not sure by much.
> 
> How do you care for the liquid?  Will it evaporate?  How much will it polymerize in a sunny room?


Hi guys
I'm with Kdog. It's not a simple comparation. SLA (resin) brings a high detailed model printed, as much more than ABS or PLA FDM printing. So how much that feature?

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