I plan on starting to sell stuff I print from Shapeways because I'm in that no-man's land of volume per model (not enough for injection molding and urethane casting seems more expensive than Shapeways). I plan on doing a decent amount of business. Are there discounts for volume?
The process doesn't get any cheaper just because you print a hundred of something.. There are significant costs to operate the printers regardless of whether you print one or a thousand. Shapeways already prints as many models at once as possible.. the prices you see now are already based on a form of a "volume discount" shared by all of us.
There is a discount for the white and colored nylon processes (strong and flexible). For bounding box densities greater than 10% you get a 50% discount for material beyond 20 cm^3. Unfortunately this would only work for multiple parts in one design file, and would rely on you selling the parts via Ebay or in person to realize any additional profits resulting from the discount. Sometimes I put multiple parts into one file to save on development and design verification costs. Details on pricing Density discount We also offer a volume and density discount on Strong & Flexible materials. For models that have greater than 10% density (material volume divided by bounding box volume), volume above the first 20cm3 is calculated with a 50% discount. Bounding box pricing on big low density products Large, extremely low density models printed in White Strong & Flexible are priced based on bounding box volume rather than material volume. For models with a bounding box over 10,000cm3 and a density less than or equal to 2.6%, the price is $.0385 per bounding box cm3 plus a base price of $1.50. See our blog post to learn more.
Yes. If your model meets the density and material volume criteria the system will automatically apply the discounts when applicable.
I've stressed that topic already in another thread with the same echo "3d costs would not change", but there are a lot of other drivers: - relation of shipping costs to 3d printing costs - packaging costs - logistic costs - handling costs - getting a customer or maybe reseller thinking in volume (maybe several times), thus requesting several more high volume requests later on .... (and least competitive service has already published an offer) I never will understand that 100 orders of the same piece are the same effort then 1 order of 100 identical pieces One of the open questions for designers using 3d printing is to get more mass business and volume offers are maybe an answer ... Woody64