How to Calculate Cost Per Print

Cost per print is the single most useful number for comparing coding and marking equipment — and the most commonly miscalculated. Most buyers divide the ink or ribbon price by the number of prints a vendor says it yields, and stop there. That figure is real, but on a typical production line it is a small fraction of what each code actually costs you.

This guide shows the full method, the formulas the Mark & Code calculator uses, and a worked example with every number shown.

The formula

Cost per print = total monthly running cost ÷ prints per month

The work is all in the first term. A complete monthly running cost has five parts:

• Consumables — ink, make-up/solvent, cartridges, ribbon, labels or printheads, depending on the technology.
• Maintenance — annual AMC, spare parts and preventive maintenance, divided by 12.
• Operator cost — the share of operator time the coding equipment actually consumes.
• Downtime cost — hours of unplanned stoppage per month × what an hour of lost production costs you.
• Rejection cost — products rejected for bad, missing or unreadable codes × the cost of each rejected product.

Why characters matter as much as prints

Ink, cartridge and ribbon consumption scale with how much you print, not just how many times the printer fires. A 30-character two-line code uses roughly twice the ink of a 15-character batch code from the same number of prints. That is why the calculator asks for characters per message: monthly characters = prints per month × characters per message, and ink or cartridge usage is driven by that number and the supplier-rated yield (characters per litre or per cartridge).

Ribbon-based printers (TTO, print & apply) are the exception: ribbon is consumed by message length in millimetres plus the gap between prints, so the geometry of the code drives cost rather than the character count.

Worked example: a CIJ printer on an FMCG line

These are the calculator's default inputs, which reproduce a real supplier CIJ running-cost worksheet: 20,000 prints a day, 26 working days a month, 12 running hours a day, 15 characters per message.

• Prints per month: 20,000 × 26 = 5,20,000
• Characters per month: 5,20,000 × 15 = 78,00,000
• Ink: 78,00,000 characters ÷ 7,00,00,000 characters per litre = 0.11 litre × ₹4,500 = ₹501 a month
• Make-up fluid: 312 running hours ÷ 72 hours per bottle = 4.33 bottles × ₹1,050 = ₹4,550 a month
• Cleaning fluid: ₹300 a month
• Maintenance: (₹60,000 AMC + ₹35,000 spares + ₹20,000 preventive) ÷ 12 = ₹9,583 a month
• Operator: ₹36,000 a month
• Downtime: 4 hours × ₹2,500 = ₹10,000 a month
• Rejection: 0.5% of 5,20,000 prints × ₹3 = ₹7,800 a month

Total running cost: ₹68,735 a month. Cost per print: ₹68,735 ÷ 5,20,000 = ₹0.132.

If you had only counted ink, you would have calculated ₹501 ÷ 5,20,000 = ₹0.001 per print — more than 100 times too low. Even counting every consumable (₹5,351) you would still be at about 8% of the real figure.

Where the money actually goes

In this example the split of the monthly running cost is:

• Operator: 52.4%
• Downtime: 14.5%
• Maintenance: 13.9%
• Rejection: 11.3%
• Consumables: 7.8%

Your numbers will differ — operator allocation in particular varies hugely between plants — but the pattern is common: the things a quotation does not show often outweigh the consumable price that buyers negotiate hardest on.

How to use this when comparing printers

• Calculate cost per print at your own volume and message length, not the vendor's.
• Ask each vendor for supplier-rated yields (characters per litre, characters per cartridge, ribbon roll length) so consumable cost can be calculated, not assumed.
• Put a real figure on downtime: what does one hour of your line standing still cost?
• Track rejection caused by coding faults separately from other rejections — it is usually under-reported.

Use the Running Cost Calculator to run this on your own numbers; it shows the breakdown above for any of ten coding technologies.