LayerFlow3D vs a spreadsheet
Every shop starts here, and a spreadsheet is free, flexible and already open. This is about the day it stops being enough, and what goes wrong first.
Checked September 15, 2026
Choose a spreadsheet if
- You are doing a handful of orders a month and the whole thing fits in your head anyway.
- What you need is genuinely odd, and the flexibility is the point - one-off costings, an experiment, a model of a business you have not started yet.
- You already have a spreadsheet that works and somebody who enjoys keeping it. That is a real asset and swapping it for software you have to learn is not automatically an improvement.
Choose LayerFlow3D if
- Your stock count and your shelf have stopped agreeing, and you do not know by how much.
- You cannot say which orders made money without setting an evening aside.
- More than one person needs to see the queue.
- You are taking orders in DMs and losing some of them.
Side by side
| Feature | LayerFlow3D | a spreadsheet |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to start | Free plan, no card. Paid plans when you outgrow it. | Free, and you already have it. |
| Changing it to suit you | Fixed shape: orders, printers, spools, models. It fits a print shop and not much else. | Anything you can think of, which is the real reason it lasts as long as it does. |
| Knowing what a spool cost | Cost per spool, carried per spool, so two spools of the same colour bought at different prices are not averaged. | Whatever was typed in, usually a single price per material. |
| Stock going down when a job prints | Finishing the job is the event. The filament comes off the spool it came off. | Somebody remembers, later, on purpose. |
| Knowing what an order made | Filament, machine hours and labour against the price, per order. | Possible, and it is an evening of somebody’s life every month. |
| What the printers are doing | Read from the machines themselves - Bambu, Creality, Klipper and OctoPrint. | A walk across the room. |
| Taking orders from customers | A public shop page with your items on it. The order lands in the same queue. | A message thread, and a row typed in afterwards. |
| Two people using it at once | Accounts, roles and permissions. | Shared, if it is in a cloud sheet, and the last person to save wins. |
| Being wrong quietly | Hard: the numbers come from the events rather than from typing. | Easy. A dragged formula, a sorted column, a row inserted above the range. |
What it costs
LayerFlow3D
Free plan with a monthly order cap, no card. Paid plans lift the cap and add pre-orders. Prices are on the pricing section.
a spreadsheet
Free, unless you count the evening a month spent reconciling it.
Questions people ask
Can I import my spreadsheet?
Orders can be brought in from a CSV export, which is what most shops have. Filament and printers are quicker to set up by hand, because the shape of a spreadsheet varies more than the shape of a spool.
What if I want to keep using the spreadsheet as well?
Plenty of shops do for a while, and it is a reasonable way to build confidence. The thing to avoid long term is two places that both claim to know the stock, because then neither does.
Is a spreadsheet actually worse at costing?
The arithmetic is identical. What a spreadsheet cannot do is notice that a job used filament, that the job failed and was reprinted, or that the spool price changed in March. That is where the number drifts, not in the formula.
How long does it take to set up?
An afternoon for a small shop: your printers, your spools with what you paid for them, and your usual items. There is no data migration to plan because nothing has to come across at once.
See it against your own numbers
Your spool prices, your printers, your rates. The free plan needs no card.
Start free →