Hi, I must say I really feel for your problem, your company was one of the very first that attracted me to Shapeways in the 1st place, along with Unellenu, both for your beautiful large pieces, I must say Shapeways dumping this on you and letting you down as well as the other pioneers who contributed in a large part to attract a lot of customers to Shapeways is really not the way to go, they seem to have forgotten who contributed to their success in the first place.
I was also planning to design several large metal pieces, so this is affecting me as well.
It seems that Shapeways have designed their new system to increase the price of anything that is longer than about 3cm or so....
The bad news is that i just found out that most ofl my brass items have seen price increases... including some dramatic ones (beyond the dreaded 100$ price mark...). My brass items were already somewhat beyond what i would call a competitive price in most cases, but now with this new change they may have priced them out the market.....
Worse, i had worked pretty hard on all those brass items (3 months full time), some of them gave me lots of trouble (despite what may seem like 'simple' shapes, the Laser for exemple was a real headache, with lots of wrong surfaces that had to be repaired one by one, lots of bad triangles in the mesh which were quite difficult to find and repair, and so on. I had to re-construct it many times due to the idiosynchrasies of the software (typical cases of non-manifold edges which happen in specific situations, other problems that get created when you try to fillet edges and so on.
So given that i had already designed these models to be close to or at the limit of what Shapeways allows for surface details and skin thickness, if i reduce my models it would deface them and i would loose all those surface details for which i had chosen brass specifically to bring them out. In fact, i would not be able to print most of my metal models in anything else than brass because otherwise too many surface details would disappear or the Shapeways software would simply block my files for other types of metal. And dumbing down the details ? (the usual Shapeways demand when they see you are not happy with their bad new changes): Already done that during the design stage. If i had to dumb them down further, not only would it take me more days/weeks to desing and repair a new mesh from scratch (due to the problems mentionned earlier)(and also due to the fact that each time you change a file, you add more errors in the new mesh, all of which must be repaired first if you want a watertight mesh... So, LOTS of extra work costing lots and lots of money to please a big company who it seems COULD NOT CARE LESS how much you will spend just to fit their new mold), and the end result would be that my models would end up looking like Fisher Price toys instead of finely detailed miniatures/keyrings (nobody comes here to buy Fisher Price toys).
So there is NO WAY i would spend several more weeks at MY EXPENSE to redesign all of those models to make them fit the new demands of Shapeways ! I have had enough trouble designing, repairing and cleaning them already water as it is.
Only 2 of my items (sold separately, as i previously didn't know it was allowed to put 2 items together in a the same file) have not changed price, due to their more simple shape, but strangely enough the base for my Monolith did not increase in price, though it is simple it does have a lot more surface area than meets the eyes, as it got sort of a 'double hull'.
Only one of my model saw a slight price decrease, my Carved Stone Spear Tip, weirdly enough because it is solid, i thought it would have gone up, but no, it went down... Go figure. Given that the explanation of Shapeays that "Parts that use a lot of support material (anything that is made of a mesh or wires and hollow) goes up in price", it seems totally illogical that this one goes down when it fact i am pretty sure it would have more surface area than the same thing it it was made of a simple mesh structure. Maybe i should have designed my Laser and my Commlock solid to avoid the price hike...?? That seems counter-intuitive because the cost of material was the driving factor (per cm cube) for price, and so it was designed as thin skinned as can be. If i made this solid, it would be afraid it might crack ? (uneven cooling does that to metal, especially if thickness varies in an important manner along the model, like on this one, everything must have pretty much a constant skin thickness to avoid problems.
All of my other models prices went up, some of them nearly double... (and i am not making large metal pieces, to me 3,4,5 cm, that's small).
So you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't with their new system... So all in all, if you are not into making only small rings and small earings, it sucks...
It now looks like i just devoted 3 months of work full time to build a range of brass products to generate some funds so that i could devote my time to design my more complex scale models products, and i just found out Shapeways made me waste my time as most of my new models have now become much more expensive thanks to their new brass price hike... After their new price hike for FED and FUD plastics, i only had my brass products left to try to generate new sales, but Shapeways now have seriously messed that up for me and for many people also... as the price of all my plastic models have already gone up, and now the price of all my most important and more numerous brass models also... Seems i will have to send things to Rinkak, Sculp teo and so on.
** (NOTE: Wow ! I just came back days later to read responses to my post only to find out Shapeways software automatically deletes the name Sculp teo when I send post... Wow, just wow... now that's one piece of software that really works... cannot say the same for the bugs on most of their other softwares I have been reporting to them since last fall and are still not fixed...).
I would have a question for Shapeways, i have no idea what you are using for you mold material to cast your brass parts, but whatever it is, if it is costing you too much (i suspect your higher cost is for post operations: i.e. specifically breaking off the mold), then it might be a good idea for you or your contractor to change material. Are you using a refractory plaster as mold material ? If yes, you might want to switch to calcium sulfate bonded investment, that would save you lots of trouble during demolding. And what kind of pour are you doing ? Gravity or vacuum assist ? Or under full vacuum ? Anyway, maybe i am wasting my time trying to help Shapeways once again when they are doing everything to sink my new products and my revenue...