New price structure

As far as the handling, small parts have several difficulties. Finding them in the powder, most smaller items have smaller details so cleaning excess material is more difficult in all materials. imagine trying to dye, or glaze these things that are so tiny, imagine with silver and stainless, how fragile the green parts are. You have to be even more careful with a tiny piece not to break it than a larger piece.

I don't have the luxury of time to spend an evening browsing my new pricing, and all the threads relating to the new page layout. Two questions, please. How do I account for the 10% discount on WSF, and WHERE is the figure for volume on the new page layout? How can I insert cm3 when I don't know what it is?

This is all very, very confusing for someone who can only afford a few minutes each night on the Shapeways site. I haven't the time to re-learn everything. I love the new arrangement of the renders and/or photographs. Everything else is too complicated and confusing. Whatever happened to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)?

Many thanks.

There's a slider on the upper left of the page "Edit Page" that you have to click to show volume, which appears right next to the dimensions. Inconvenient, isn't it?

From what I understand, the volume discount for 10% density or higher will work the same as now, but with a lower rate, so the price will be $1.50 + $1.40 * (volume up to 20 cm3) + $0.70 * (volume above 20 cm3).

upper right (the other left)

Understood, many thanks!

Sorry if I missed it, are multiple parts per file ok?

Well, you guys made me feel better about the download files being corrupt and unusable, I'll have to wait for the 1st to order silver anyways.

How will the new pricing affect items like earrings that come in a pair? Is that going to be one handling fee or two?

probably 1 per stl like it was before in WSF and other materials that had the startup cost.

It will be the same as now. One startup/handleing fee per pair.

Reading between the lines about multiple parts per file - Shapeways would obviously prefer to discourage this as multiple parts increase the time spent handling each model dramatically.

I'm aware of this as I sell several sets of dice and miniatures (up to ten in a set) and I've had occasion to have a model rejected because of it having too many parts.

This led to a short discussion by email of the problem, and the likely outcome is that Shapeways is going to begin rejecting models that consist of too many disconnected parts (IIRC the limit may well be twelve separate parts, although with the new pricing structure they may reduce this.)

I can see the need for Shapeways to make a public decision about this (rather than the 'Gentlemans agreement' mentioned in the last Shapeways Live.)

If only one part per model becomes enforced, then it more-or-less kills a huge proportion of their customer base. (A reasonable upper limit would be acceptable, of course; a dozen seems fair - but that is for me, not other folk, of course.)

For one, it will kill a lot (if not most of) the miniatures modellers, myself included: there is no point using Shapeways if it becomes far more expensive than metal. (How can you do tanks, for instance, if you are obliged to do the turret and hull as seperate models?) If you can economically only use it for master creation - well, frankly, there are far better services out there for that job. There has been a really burgeoning starship modelling community, but Shapeways is looming very close to losing nearly the entirety of it at it's current rate (as well as getting all the bad publicity fall out).

(And Shapeways cannot be unaware of it, given that they are releasing that 3D random starship generator - though the existance does make it seem like they don't really quite understand the market there.)

And what about stuff like Oskar's puzzles, which have a reputation enough that even I, someone who is soley interested in miniatures, have heard of? For what I can gather from his shop (without seeing the 3D images, thanks to the delightful new product page) they are either composed of multiple pieces (as a kit or in-situ) or sprued together... And I can't imagine that even if they are sprued they can be easy to clean. (Or does that sort of thing get a pass because it's already expensive?)

At the end of the day, if Shapeways wants to function as a universal 3D printer service, it's going to have to grit their teeth and realise that people are going to want small things printed, sometimes. It's part of the job. Shapeways is in a good position now because it is about the only one who is cheap, and getting a reputation. When it loses that advantage, when other companies start to follow suite (and it's inevitable they will) or the price of the machines themselves and the reliablity comes down (and it's well on it's way, sometimes within the next 2-5 years), there will be no reason to stick with Shapeways if they can't offer a competative service.

(There's already a miniatures company in England that's somehow producing (solid) 1/72nd and 1/144 vehicles at half the price of what it would cost in WSF from Shapeways but with a finish closer to WD. (No, I don't know how they are doing that. I suspect they have access to an industrial-engineering grade machine (i.e. one that does something like Formula One prototyping or something.)). Point is, it's coming steadily.

Hey guys,

First, you all propose interesting points and difficult questions. There's no magic solution for this. The truth is, that printing individual pieces does make it incredibly difficult to sort and thus raise the cost in labor.

Second, we don't want to inhibit any creativity of our community. Reasonable bundling (puzzles, sets, earrings) does make sense. We don't want to penalize you guys for creating sets that makes sense. There are people, though, who bundle together a few items that should be distinct to get around the start up costs. Unfortunately, these in the end, will raise the price for everybody because the costs as a whole will increase at an imbalanced rate to the revenue.

In the end, we are working on tools to better detect distinct parts and will charge accordingly. However, we also recognize that certain items are natural sets (ie earrings) and are conceptually "one item." Rather than just raising the price for everybody, we will also come out with some suggestions on how to create sprues that lower labor (there are ways of creating sprues that actually adds to handling labor and having a lot of people bundle sprues in a way to makes it more difficult to handle also raise the cost for everybody), and how to create cages for loose parts. If there are any other brilliant ideas on bundling, please let me know.

I hope that addresses some of your questions.

Thanks,
Nancy

I personally, make quite a lot of things in bulk packs as, if I were to do them individually, the start-up cost would exceed the material cost and they would be priced out of the market.

I'm re-selling them , individually or in pairs on eBay, but after I've treated them myself ( I've dyed or painted them , sometimes assembling with other non-Shapeways parts)

I've tried sprueing these parts together but was unable to get a decent answer as to whether this was a good idea or just made it harder to handle.

After most of them arrived here with the sprues broken or missing completely I've now abandoned using them.

So far no one has ever contacted me to say I've been putting too many models in one STL file.

Tom

I don't see how you can even begin to do that without human effort and arbitarily assigning weight to certain types of product. I don't see how you can fairly assign a split. If you say, yes, earrings and puzzles are allowed to be in multiple pieces, but badges or miniatures aren't?

And are you really suggesting that the folks making earrings, for example, are going to have to start using sprues or cages? In metal, with the wall thickness of those materials? Sprues in plastic is all well and good but I imagine in metal they'll be a nightmare to remove (unless you are going to spend the time to do it yourselves, rather than the end user.)

Not too mention that, once again, this means increased cost to the customer (not so much to me, as I work in the cheap stuff but it'll be quite considerable for those wanting metal.) And not having sprues is an advantages of 3D printing in the first.

So where does chain malle come into the equation?
Imagine, I submit a 800 ring chain maille model, the software picks it up as 200 individual models joined by 600 links... or worse, it could be the other way around. Obviously, WSF or FUD only (metals are a no no)

Now ^ that was a stupid example... but?

'Adapt & survive' is my catch phrase for the week - that's what Shapeways are doing with the restructuring... gotta go with the flow, sink or swim and all that.

I went to order another copy of my heart ornament, in order to test the Co-Creator platform to make sure I understand how that works before someone else decides to buy one.

I was a little surprised at the price of the stainless steel for my model. My earlier order cost about $40, since the model is nearly 4 cm3. This order comes to $50.

Another oddity: Every single price is rounded to the nearest 5 cents.

This is a screenshot from the spreadsheet I created when the new pricing model was announced. I copied the column for 4 cm3 from the old and new models ("old" and "new' columns, respectively). I also copied down the current price I see for my model. This is the "current" column.
View attachment 11165

So, what happened? I'm willing to assume an error on someone's part, as this does not seem to represent what was communicated last week.

One important note: The error shows up on that particular model (which is a co-creator), but not on the other models I checked, which are still using the old pricing structure.

Puzzles are actually reasonably easy to handle. With WSF it is possible to build a sinterbox around them which keeps the parts contained - it's sort of a wire mesh box. Cleaning is quite easy and is done with the parts contained in the sinterbox so it hardly is any more work than cleaning one model.

However, Shapeways does not ship the parts inside of the sinterbox and counts all the parts by hand. If a part goes missing it's apparently a lot of work to figure out which one it is - this is apparently the worst of handling puzzles.

I think that trying to write software that detects multiple parts is a waste of time. I think you should rather do a manual check which also allows you greater flexibility in allowing some leeway.
You might allow a first-time customer to make this mistake once, sending out the order along with a warning "please don't do this again". For experienced designers you would just refuse to print a multi part model.

There are two things that annoy me about the current WSF pricing:

- The incentive to hollow parts unnecessarily. I make all my puzzles with 0.7mm hollow parts while the actual cost for making solid parts is very tiny. This is annoying because I would prefer solid parts (nicer feel, weight, less work to design) but the pricing greatly discourages it.

- The fact that with the startup fee, we're forced to stack parts in one file (or do the high poly/composite model thing). The truth is that counting the parts and figuring out which ones are missing would be infinitely easier if we could just supply the parts one model per part instead of one model per puzzle. Though obviously amending this would need some way to make a part group of various models so customers can order easily.

*AND* Ponoko ships by mail, not UPS, (I've only used them once so I assume that's still the case) and THAT alone would save me a minimum EXTRA $14 charge from UPS at my door!

Glenn

sadly ill have to consider another options like imaterialize and ponoko.

I was really really happy with the service of shapeways even thought the last orders were delayed...

I dont like that changes and ill start production in another company even considering they are still a little more expensive.

bye shapeways

this is what you are doing:
forcing us all to put multiple parts into one file to save money if our files are small.

you were already doing this before with many of your materials. now you are doing it on all of them.

the result of your "philosophy" is that you are NOT a retailer, you are a wholesaler. you only make affordable small products when we order multiple parts in the same file. not even the same order.

what this means for me: i will never place an order without putting many parts into one file. fine, this new pricing structure WILL save me money, because i will basically be cheating the system. you will be removing sprews from 20 rings for the price of 1. OK with me. maybe not so OK with you, as i doubt this is your goal.

this is exactly the same a having a handling charge per material in an order rather than per part. you seem to allow this, so why not be honest about it? if you implemented a handling fee *per material* in an order rather than *per file*, i wouldn't have to upload a new file every time i made an order. all you're doing is wasting my time and your server space making me upload a million files.

you're not looking at the big picture. the result of this price change will not be the one you are looking for.

as for the rest of you- if you still want to sell through your printer, try the company out of new zealand. but i suggest merging parts into one file and selling on a site where everything ISN'T 3D printed and your stuff can have more impact.