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Injection Molding Break-Even Calculator
Slide your tooling cost, unit costs, and volume and watch the crossover move. Flip to Pro to type the exact numbers off your quotes — ours or any vendor’s — or estimate mold economics straight from your part’s dimensions. Toggle Overseas to see what container freight and duties really do to the math. Powered by the same cost model as our instant estimate tool.
Interactive — run your own numbers
Overseas adds ocean freight + import duties to the molded line.
Exact numbers off your quotes — ours or any vendor’s. Freight + tariff count only when MOLD RUNS: OVERSEAS.
Set your part, then hit Estimate — the model fills tooling + molded cost above and sets container fill for overseas freight.
Unit-cost math only — the four factors below move the real answer.
MODEL ASSUMPTIONS — WHAT’S UNDER THE HOOD
Machining $15/cm² × complexity × depth · Mold base $2k (micro) → $40k (XXL) by largest dimension
Material $/kg: ABS 2.50 · PP 1.80 · PA 4.50 · PC 5.00 · TPE 6.00 · TPU 7.00 (×1.1 waste)
Container: 20,000 kg / 33 m³ · $1,500 freight · 7.5% duty defaults
Multi-cavity tooling scales ×N0.7 on base + machining · Press rate $35–150/hr by clamp tonnage (proj. area × cavities, ~3 t/in²)
Lead times: mold design 2–3 wk + tooling 7–28 wk (size × mold class) + T1 samples 2–4 wk + first run 2–4 wk + freight (ground 1 wk / ocean + customs 4 wk) · additive first article ~2 wk, weekly batches after
Break-even tooling ÷ (printed $/part − molded $/part); overseas adds stepwise freight + duties
Pro-mode fields override all of this. The estimator is an estimate, not a quote.
The chart is the easy part
Unit-cost math captures maybe a third of the real decision. The other two-thirds:
Mold tooling runs 8–16 weeks to first shot. Additive is days. Sometimes molding isn’t more expensive — it’s unavailable.
$2,000–$8,000 per mold change, versus uploading a new STL. Most first-year products revise two or three times.
Molds amortize through big batches — months of parts bought up front, whether or not they sell.
Tooling is due before the first part ships. Additive is pay-as-you-go.
These usually move the effective break-even 3–5× above the naive number. The full argument, worked examples, and the honest list of where molding still wins: 3D printing vs injection molding — the volume math that wins.