Allen Posted February 10, 2020 Share Posted February 10, 2020 Do any of you print 3d models to sell? This is a good article to keep in mind. ==== If you’re running a 3D printing service, or a product development company where you’re quoting customers on digital fabrication services, there’s a good chance that you’re pricing wrong. Here’s how I know. In the last five years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of 3D printing/Additive Manufacturing business owners about how they price their services and a vast majority of them undersell their services. The three primary reasons are either a combination or one of the following: They don’t take into account all of the ancillary components that go into running a business. They charge purely based on the volume of the CAD model not taking into account exponential price increases or decreases. Taking their slicer output of time to print and material usage too literal without physically measuring those parameters and taking into account #1 above. Based on those hundreds of hours of conversation combined with years of industry experience, I’ve developed a holistic methodology on how to price for 3D printed parts and projects that accounts for all aspects of the business (human/machine time, machine depreciation, software, facility cost) the size of the job, and the unique attributes of the parts. I’ll share that methodology with you today, but first, a little more context on how I got here. Mike Moceri, the founder and CEO of MakerOS. Back in 2013, while I was running a 3D printing service bureau, my team and I received an order from a Fortune 500 company to print them approximately 15,000 individual parts for a toy line. At the time, we were charging a little less than $1 per cubic centimeter printing in PLA and Nylon PA12, and that’s how we ended up pricing them for the job. The project ended up being a very challenging one (that’s a whole different story that you should ask me about at some point) and after some time gaining more experience over the years, I realized that, considering how immensely large the job was, we should have priced about 70% more than what we originally quoted. There’s a lot we didn’t factor for: the manual time it takes to prep, slice, validate, think through how to plate up and pull off parts; the software costs to execute all of those tasks; how long it actually took to print parts accounting for machine depreciation. It was quite a learning experience – in fact, it ultimately changed my life because I decided to do something about it, and I’m still doing it today. View the full article kopachini 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr. Mike Posted March 17, 2020 Share Posted March 17, 2020 Interesting article about the hidden costs of 3D printing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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