SLA/DLP Resin Calculator

Resin printing has a cost structure FDM users often underestimate: liquid resin gets lost to more than just the part itself, and it's typically sold and priced by the liter rather than by the gram. This calculator starts with part volume plus the auto-generated support volume (both measured in milliliters, since resin's density is close enough to water that 1 mL is treated as 1 cm³), then adds a waste factor on top to account for resin that clings to vat walls, drips off during draining, or gets sacrificed to failed cure attempts — typically 5-15% of the raw part-plus-support volume. Multiplying that per-part total by part count gives the batch total, and dividing your cost-per-liter input by 1000 converts it to a cost-per-milliliter rate applied consistently throughout.

The bottles-needed figure is where this calculator earns its keep for shopping purposes: it rounds up to whole bottles at your specified bottle size — resin only ships sealed, so a job needing 1,150 mL still means buying two full 1,000 mL bottles — and then reports the actual cost of purchasing those whole bottles alongside the leftover resin you'll have on hand afterward — useful for deciding whether to size a batch to use up a bottle exactly or accept some carryover. Keep in mind the waste factor is a single flat percentage applied uniformly; in practice waste is more front-loaded (vat priming, first layers) and matters proportionally more for small, quick jobs than for large batches, so treat the estimate as a planning figure that tends to run slightly conservative for bigger prints and slightly optimistic for very small ones.