Built by a 3D printer, for 3D printers

I'm Daniel. I run a 3D printing business in Australia called Printforge, specialising in custom products for tradies, EV owners, families, and makers. I run a fleet of Bambu Lab printers — X1C, P1S, and A1 Mini — and sell through my Shopify store and local commissions.

When I started taking on custom work, I hit the same wall every print shop owner hits: pricing. I was using spreadsheets to quote jobs, but they never captured the full picture. Material cost was easy — weigh the filament, multiply by cost per gram. But what about machine depreciation? A $1,500 printer running 5,000 hours costs $0.30 per hour just in depreciation. What about electricity at $0.30/kWh? Nozzle wear? The 10–20% of prints that fail? The 15–30 minutes of hands-on time for file review, support removal, quality checks, and packaging?

I looked at existing software. Some tools managed printers but didn't do quoting. Some did quoting but cost $40+/month for three printers with no invoicing. Others were built for large service bureaus, not a small operator running a print farm from a workshop.

So I built Printforge. It started as a cost calculator that accounted for everything — material, machine time, labour, and overhead. Then I added professional PDF quotes. Then invoicing with Stripe payments. Then job tracking, client CRM, Shopify integration, Xero sync, and a marketplace to connect print shops with local customers.

It grew into the platform I wished I'd had from day one: one place to run the entire business, from the moment a customer reaches out to the moment they pay.

You should own your data. Your client list, your quotes, your invoices — that's your business. Printforge runs on your infrastructure via Docker. No vendor lock-in. Full database access. You can export everything, any time.

Small operators deserve proper tools. You shouldn't need to be a 20-printer service bureau to afford business software. The Hobby tier is free forever — not a 7-day trial. Paid tiers start at $12 AUD/month.

The calculator should feel instant. No loading spinners, no server round-trips for cost calculations. Change a number, see the result immediately. That's non-negotiable.