What Does a UV Print Cost? Calculating Ink, Material and Time

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Ink is rarely the biggest cost item in UV printing. The blank, your working time and the machine itself often weigh more heavily. If you only count the millilitres, you will price too low. Here you can see which items belong in the unit price and how to work them out for your own products.

Calculate it directly: With the UV printing cost calculator you enter your own values and see cost price, profit and margin per piece.

The cost items at a glance

Ink: consumption per m² and per piece

Consumption depends on droplet size, coverage and the number of layers. Documented values:

• For white at 100 % coverage, eufyMake gives 6.42 ml/m² (4 pl), 12.85 ml/m² (8 pl) and 28.91 ml/m² (18 pl), depending on droplet size.
• The printing machine supplier Imago calculates about 15 ml/m² for CMYK at 100 % coverage. According to Imago, solid white underneath increases consumption by 80 to 120 %.

Normal designs do not cover every colour at 100 %. A photo in CMYK therefore usually sits well below this maximum value. White and varnish, on the other hand, are often printed over the whole area. With relief and texture, the consumption of white and varnish rises sharply because many layers lie on top of each other. More on this in Colour layers in UV printing.

Prices are roughly between €0.12 and €0.45 per ml. Open systems with bottles are cheaper (Procolored lists 500 ml for 59 US dollars, so around 0.12 dollars per ml), cartridges for closed systems are more expensive (eufyMake: €29.99 for 100 ml, so €0.30 per ml). More on the differences in UV ink.

How to calculate it: area in m² × consumption in ml/m² × price per ml. An A4 area is 0.0624 m².

On top of that comes ink that does not end up on the product. One example: the eufyMake E1 flushes 0.2 ml per colour channel before a print job if nothing has been printed for at least 12 hours. With six channels that is 1.2 ml, whether a key ring or a poster follows. If you print several jobs in a row, you only pay this once. If you print several pieces in one job, the share is spread further.

The most accurate value comes from your print or RIP software. Many programs show the consumption per channel after printing. Note it down for each product.

Primer, blank and electricity

Primer is needed on smooth surfaces such as glass, metal or some plastics. It is usually applied thinly with a cloth or pen, and the cost per piece is in the cent range. Details under Primer.

Blanks are often the biggest single item. Always use your real purchase price here, including a share of shipping.

Electricity hardly matters. An A3 flatbed printer such as the OMTech Spectra A3+ states a power of 280 W. With 20 minutes of print time and an assumed €0.35 per kWh, a print costs around 3 cents.

Maintenance, waste and machine

Maintenance and wear: cleaning fluid, wipers, capping parts and, eventually, a new print head. A replacement head costs from a few hundred to over a thousand euros, depending on the type. Include a flat rate per piece. How to work out the annual costs is explained in Running costs of a UV printer.

Waste: failed prints, blanks that slipped, adhesion problems. A reject rate of 5 to 10 % is a sensible starting value, more for round or small parts. You pay for the blank and ink of the failed prints with the good pieces, so the surcharge is slightly higher than the rate: rate ÷ (1 − rate), so for 10 % waste around 11 % on material and ink, for 15 % around 18 %.

Machine: divide the purchase price by the expected service life and the number of pieces in that time. A machine costing €2,500, used for three years with 1,500 pieces per year, comes to around €0.56 per piece.

Three worked examples

The three examples show three typical cost drivers: labour for the canvas, blank and weight for the glass trophy, throughput for the bulk order of pens. Blank prices come from retailers’ figures (as of 10/2026, sources below), everything else is an assumption that you should replace with your own values.

Common assumptions: ink €0.30 per ml (cartridge price of the eufyMake E1), labour €25 per hour, electricity €0.35 per kWh, machine €2,500 over three years.

Canvas 30 × 40 cm: painting board without primer or stretched canvas with primer

For canvas, eufyMake and xTool do not name a primer but a white base layer under the design. On stretched canvas, flexible white ink makes sense: in a bending test by xTool, rigid white ink cracked after 5 bends, while flexible ink stayed intact. Primer can still help on coarse or highly absorbent canvas, but only a test print will show that.

Assumptions: design with white underneath, but without full colour coverage across the whole area, about 18 ml/m² (the typical value in the calculator; full colour coverage with solid white would be around 30 ml/m²), so around 2.2 ml, plus 0.6 ml for the flushing share. Painting board from a pack of 10 (€14.99 plus shipping), stretched canvas €5 (retailers’ prices for 30 × 40 cm range from €1.39 to €10.99). You place and align both blanks, and the eufyMake E1 measures the height itself. That takes around 5 minutes per piece. For the stretched canvas, add about 3 minutes for applying primer and letting it flash off.

The material for the primer costs only a few cents. What you notice is the three extra minutes of work it needs per piece, which for 100 canvases adds up to 5 hours. The biggest difference here, though, comes from the more expensive blank.

Glass trophy made of crystal glass: when weight limits the quantity

On glass, primer is mandatory, and eufyMake explicitly calls it essential. One tester did not get permanently secure adhesion even with pretreatment, so an adhesion test with adhesive tape and a fingernail belongs with every new glass blank. UV printing on glass is generally not dishwasher-safe even with primer, but that is rarely required for a trophy. More on this under Printing on acrylic and glass.

The sticking point is weight. A trophy measuring 18 × 13 × 1.5 cm weighs around 0.9 kg. Four pieces would fit side by side on the A3 area of the eufyMake E1, but according to the manufacturer the print bed is only rated for 1.5 kg. So one trophy is run per pass. Each one is placed, aligned and started individually, and the setup time is not shared with a second piece. Other machines carry more, the Epson SC-V1000 for example 3 kg. Many manufacturers give no value at all, in which case ask support.

Assumptions: design 10 × 8 cm with white, colour and varnish, about 0.3 ml including the flushing share. Blank €12 (blank glass awards cost about €8 to €18 for 10 pieces, depending on size and supplier). Primer pad €0.30. Waste 15 %, because glass is unforgiving. 10 minutes of labour per piece for cleaning, priming, placing and checking.

For comparison: finished crystal glass awards cost €27 to €55 at trophy retailers in Germany, and a UV print is sometimes added there for a surcharge of over €30. Blank and waste make up two thirds of the costs here. If you offer glass, you should therefore calculate with your own waste value, not with the standard one.

Bulk order: 2,000 pens with a logo

Pens are a classic among promotional gifts. The question here is not what a pen costs, but whether the order is worthwhile at all with a desktop machine.

Assumptions: plastic pen, blank, €0.25 including shipping. Logo 40 × 8 mm in white and colour, about 0.02 ml per pen. 15 minutes per pass including loading and unloading (there are no manufacturer figures for print time here). Waste 5 %.

The machine flat rate of €0.56 per piece from the other examples is not included here. It assumes 1,500 pieces per year and would distort the result for an order of 2,000 cheap pieces. What the occupied machine time means is explained further down under “Always include the machine time”.

The 10-pen holder is available from third-party suppliers for the eufyMake E1, and 28 pens fit in Procolored’s A4 pen holder.

The market shows where the limit lies: promotional product retailers sell 2,000 plastic pens with a single-colour logo for about €0.20 to €0.60 each, and with a full-colour digital print for about €0.30 to €1.00. They mostly print using pad printing, where the printing share comes to around €0.17 per pen including setup.

A good order or not?

• Single-colour logo in large quantities: Hardly economical with a desktop UV printer. The labour alone is above the market price, and the machine is tied up for a week.
• Full-colour logo, gradient or photo: Here UV printing can keep up if the price is in the upper range and the holder takes many pens.
• Personalisation with names: Every pen is different, which pad printing cannot do economically. UV printing is strong here, although more at 50 than at 2,000 pieces.
• Always include the machine time: 50 hours of pens are 50 hours in which no better-paid jobs are running.

For business use

• Measure consumption, do not estimate it. Print each new product once as a test and note the consumption from the software.
• Bundle jobs. Flushing and setup time are spread across more pieces.
• Include fees. Marketplace and payment fees, taxes and returns come on top of the cost prices above.
• Plan for complaints. A replacement piece that you reprint costs you the full unit price plus shipping.

Continue with: Running costs of a UV printer and Product ideas for UV printing.

Sources of the blank and market prices

As of 10/2026, prices vary by retailer and quantity.

• Painting boards 30 × 40 cm in a pack of 10: Kaufland Marktplatz
• Stretched canvas 30 × 40 cm: Action, toom (Lefranc & Bourgeois)
• Blank glass awards: retailer prices from xTool, Longforte (UK) and B2B platforms; final prices at trophy retailers in Germany
• Load capacity of the eufyMake E1: manufacturer datasheet, Epson SC-V1000: specialist retailer printequipment.de
• Flexible white ink on canvas: xTool Support
• Promotional pens and pad printing: price scales of German promotional product retailers (e.g. lerche-werbemittel.de, kronauer.de)