Pricing Changes

That kind of pricing might cause people to submit larger models to try to hit the sweet spot where floor price transitions to printing costs to get the most bang for their buck. There's no point in fighting to get minimal material/machine space/bounding box if you're sitting below that minimum floor cost. However if you're sitting just above the floor price there might be some incentive to thin walls, etc. as much as possible to reduce the cost. But for a lot of products that might have cost $5 before a doubling to $10 or so will likely kill their sales. Those are the existing models that would be very likely to move to another vendor if they have cheaper printing prices. Think of it as Shapeways sending the pain of small parts manufacturing and screening to other companies. I'm not sure anyone likes dealing with parts that are very itty-bitty (in some materials).

I assume there won't be a mechanism (like a hover over) to see what price changes are in store for existing products as of Oct. 22nd. That might encourage people to re-upload their designs as new models to get a better idea of what's in store for them in 2019. I hope the servers will be able to withstand that assault.

I wonder what the target custemers is at SW, the maximum bounding box limits reasonable sized products, file size limits complex parts, minimum price limits cheep parts and minimum size limits small parts.

About all it leaves is mid sized simple parts priced moderately or expensively. Don't see how focusing on a crowded and saturated part of the market is a path to success. I guess if we are all not here this time next year, we will have 20/20 hindsite.

Wow.

If I remember correctly the prices were "adjusted" just under 2 months ago. This already made a lot of single models much more expensive to print. I found that doing multi-model prints (20-40 products in a single print for example) brought the price much closer to when they were priced on product volume before. But effectively you ruled out a lot of your individual print customers then.

When you're a business who orders in bulk, the previous changes were acceptable in most scenarios, resulting in a small increase in individual costs.

The price changes made on Sunday are outrageous. Now all of the multi product prints are 30% - 50% more expensive too, which is going to rule out a lot of bulk order entities like myself too. I would say across the two pricing changes, there has been an average increase of between 35% - 60% depending on the type of model you are printing compared to 4 months ago.

I have also been very disappointed about is my last two recent orders (large orders which have been several hundreds of $), the quality has not been as good as it used to be. My first order I had defect marks all over the surface and requested a re-print, which the support team were very good with. My most recent order the 0.5mm minimal gap between moving parts guideline on versatile plastic is wrong. I left a 0.65mm gap as I always do and half of the moving parts are fused together. This is currently been sorted out by support. I have also found recent prints just haven't been cleaned up in post processing to the same standard as before either.

Before the price changes 2 months ago, I never had any issues with print quality, they were always great.

Increasing your costs is one thing, but seemingly decreasing your print quality too is outrageous. It feels like your trying to squeeze every penny out of us now whilst getting by on a print quality "you can get away with". I've spent thousands of $ on Shapeways and I am extremely disappointed with these recent changes. The severity of the changes just doesn't make sense.

Too me this isn't just about keeping "competitive" but it's also pure greed. This is never going to go down well with any customer and I think you're going to lose a lot of customers over the next few months. I also don't see how any of these changes can go down well in terms of making more money, which is clearly your goal.

Like many others on here, I will be finding a new printing service provider.

Who knows any others?

I haven't seen any price change yet or if it is live, it is only 0.02 - 0.03 $ more or less. Weird

SW seems so scared that they throw announcements in the forums without allowing you to respond: https://www.shapeways.com/forum/t/new-pricing-is-now-active.98184/#post-230244

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TEXT
If you have questions or need help, please contact service@shapeways.com.

The fastest way to know the price of your specific model is to upload it!

For those of you who have too many models to do that, please contact us for help.

If you have a commitment to a customer or personal deadline that cannot be met at this time due to the new manufacturing speeds, please contact us.

You can check out more specifics on minimum pricing as well as pricing for finishes in Versatile Plastic in this detailed post.

Shapeways had to make some changes for our own business, but our intent was never to do it in a way that would make yours harder. We know it is a busy time of year. If you have a high volume of models, deadlines for your customers, API questions, or any other issues causing you headaches in this transition, please contact us so we can help. We have already been assisting customers. And we will help you.

Erica

Erica Clayton
Customer Service & Quality Manager
Shapeways*

====

Well, as predicted new prices are a horror.
All text of the CEO can be thrown in the bin, because all was incorrect. Prices went up by +/-5%. Sure.

Just compared 1 test model:
Old price (or until end 2018) --> new price wnt up to 346% of the original price.

And then of course I tried to spriue stuff together for a check... And... the smart total custom er unfriendly and surely never tried new UI can't deal with an upload and remains in analyze mode forever. I've reported this befor in our test shop. And still SW didn't manage anything.

Good bye

This, right here, scares me to death.

Ouch, and I was bitching about an 88% increase on my steel pieces...
And yes, bit of an annoyance that commenting is closed on that thread.

Same model, price changes from day to day.----


Versatile Plastic, more than doubled.

Fine Detail Plastic, almost doubled.

While steel, aluminium, bronze apparently went down.

I'm assuming you didn't have this live for sale in your shop so it's been subject to the price increase...
I missed a couple out by accident and had the same problem.
Some of my lines I DONT WANT in my shop, as they are stock items for me! Or custom orders for people where I need to be able to re-order them but don't want others buying them.

Good God the new UI is horrible. Can we please have a link to the 3d tools on the main item page for each model? Currently the only way to access that is the three dots on the long list of models. How hard can it be to design a UI that works? Those model pages need to contain useful info to model designers, they shouldn't be trying to be shop pages. How come no one at shapeways seems to understand this!

Yes, I forgot to add it to the shop.
Anyway it's no big deal, as 2019 is getting close, and all model prices will be changed by that time.

That post is basically just an announcement. Comments/complaints/rants can still be posted here in the active and related thread.

[QUOTE="To put it as calmly as I can, it is time to reevaluate my time investment in this enterprise.[/QUOTE]
Same here my friend. I'm looking around now for another company. Not worth my time to keep doing it this way and turn some type of prophet to keep my hobby from dipping into the house hold budget. I better off going back to the old mold and resin casting. even though more work on me. But these changes the last couple times have been nightmare and cost me more away from family then it worth. Doing this as hobby to support my other hobbies..

Way I receive the email and read it was just a 5% increase is material pricing. Not a revamp of the whole system and the website. It said nothing about the website going to change again and it only been 4 month since the last increase and website update. I keep snap shots. But today blew me away on the model I uploaded today. double the price and no way to add my nickel to it...……...

I was going to work on more BattleTech vehicles. Since very few are offer . Plus continue the N-scale line for the mechwarrior size. like many been doing. But now. I don't think it be worth it to do now.

You got it bro. If we all left at the same time. They go under here in the States.

I didn't have to recreate a new account. I uploaded a new model today and I was like WFT double plus some then the others in the same line. Plus no way to even add my nickel to it and nothing about a website update the new Ui suxs. worst then the last change.

The new model page really does suck the big wazoo. Horrible, putrid, obtuse, icky, stupid are a few words that come to mind. It's been floating around for newer accounts but now has been applied to everyone. I feel your pain brother!

If you want to sell a model in your shop you can no longer generate a product page from the model page. You need to go to the mymodels page listing first. On the far right side of the line for a model you'll see three vertical dots. Once you click on that you'll have some options pop up, one of which is "Create a Product." That will create the normal product page where you can add your markups for each material, etc. It's another horrible change of the interface if only because finding models in the mymodels listing can be a real pain in the ass for various reasons. Navigation on the site has gone from GPS back to a magnetized needle stuck through a cork and floating in a bowl of water.

Don't ask me how I really feel about all this.

Thanks for mentioning the 3-dot thing to get to the 3d tools page. I was scared to death when I uploaded a new model this evening only to find the old, reliable upload-and-buy page had been turned into the new (and, for designers, grotesquely featureless) purchase page it now is. I can't fathom why they spent web development time and budget on overhauling the designer's upload page to make it less useful for analyzing designs. Did focus groups somewhere demand less functionality from the page in which you upload your iterated design changes specifically to ensure printability and affordability?

I hope SW gets the upload page's UI fixed up, but there seems to be a trend toward ever-lower functionality so my hopes are low. First, the pricing detail tooltips went away, now 3d tools can't be reached from that page and you can't even rename your model. (Seriously, how in the world do you rename a model now?) I'm not sure what else they can take away from the upload page except maybe for hiding the render from us or making it a static image rather than a 3d object. I guess eventually it will end up as just a PayPal donation button.

And on the matter of pricing, well...the only reason I can imagine to obfuscate pricing algorithms is to hide markup. For example, consider pricing floors based on machine space and/or material volume. Suppose you have an arbitrary boundary above which prices are jacked up a few dollars, yet the model itself requires the same handling, same processing, same shipping, and more or less the same material volume as the same model reduced by 0.01mm in one dimension. Well, that's a few dollars the customer doesn't know they could save with only a minor adjustment, so it ends up being a few dollars you get to play with because your marginal cost for that tiny bit of machine space and material volume is way, WAY less than those few dollars you just charged the customer. I understand the logic of it (though I would debate the wisdom) and I can understand the impulse to find profit that way. However, it seems like a lazy and scuzzy way to find profit, and at the rates they are charging they better be careful in determining how much of that monkey business the market can bear. Too much tomfoolery and they will be in serious trouble. I'm totally in favor of for-profit companies and I don't begrudge SW their desire/need to chase a profit. That's the same thing I am doing here. And I want SW to do well. I just loathe when someone tries to hide the ball from me. If you weren't charging enough, fine, raise the rates to stay solvent. Institute floor pricing. Cut costs where you can do so without slitting your own throat with bad quality. Do what you must. But for heaven's sake, keep the pricing transparent so we know you aren't screwing us and so we can make the best and most educated choices for our designs.

I just went looking to check what the actual file name is of several of my products and there doesn't seem to be any way to do that if the file name is long.
The web page where you could previously update an item has been changed and the file name field is truncated so that the full file name can't be seen.
I put version numbers at the end of the file name and now I can't read a number of them. I do a check of the existing previously uploaded file name before updating an item.

Well done again Shapeways.