Our CEO Peter Weijmarshausen
announced a price change for 'Sparse' White Strong & Flexible models today:
In our mission to enable everyone to make, buy and sell their own products, we know that the price of each product is important. Whether you're making something for yourself or selling your design in our shops, a product that's too expensive immediately sends you back to the drawing board. Shapeways' model is and will be to give everyone access to state of the art 3D printers at the best possible price. As a result over the years, our prices have come down substantially. White Strong & Flexible is one of our most popular materials, and we are continuously working to lower our cost to enable us to lower prices for you.
Before we can further lower prices, we've run into an issue that's holding us back: Some products are very large yet use very little material - typically these are "wiry" in design and have very low density, meaning they use very little material for the size of the object. In some cases these products take up an entire print tray in our largest printers. The technical term is that these products have a large "bounding box with low density". As a result, some of these products cost us much more than what we charge to produce today. In some of the most extreme cases, we might charge $100 for a product today that costs us $3,000 to make. I'm sure you understand this isn't a healthy situation for us, particularly as our goal is to make 3D Printing affordable for everyone.
As part of our effort to lower our prices across the board, we have to solve this issue with a change in our pricing structure that will only impact these "extreme" cases.
For the White Strong & Flexible, the pricing change will be as follows: for models with an overall bounding box of 10,000cm3 or more (for instance, a cube of 20 x 20 x 25 cm) AND that have a density less than or equal to 2.6%, we switch to a new pricing scheme.
Instead of a price per material volume, the new price will be based on the total bounding box volume. This will more accurately reflect the actual costs. The price per volume of bounding box will be $0.0385/cc.
To be clear: products that are either small enough OR have a sufficiently high density will not be affected by this change – this only affects very large models with very low density.
Today's change is a necessary step in moving towards a lower price for the White Strong & Flexible and this price change addresses a few edge cases that were blocking this effort. All existing models will be updated with the new pricing models as will all future uploads.
After the change goes live we will monitor what happens and are confident that it will enable us to lower prices for the rest of the products made in Strong & Flexible in the future.
Pete
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Pete is answering questions on the blog - please feel free to ask him anything about this change there.