This Is Insane...

I have ABS filament and I print small things, and for a print that I am doing, I decided to contact Shapeways for cheaper bulk options. How can they sell this for so much money? It costs me 3 or 4 dollars to print something of this size.
It's too expensive... 90 DOLLARS FOR A SINGLE THING??!?!?!?
Even with my ABS I could print 30 of these for the same price, at home. I am looking for an affordable option, and this is absurd. How can you steal money from people like this? If you can print me 20 of these for that price, I'd look into buying them.
Thanks,
Daniel

Shapeways uses printers that produce smoother surfaces, finer details, etc. They are NOT your average home FDM printer.
Yes, you can FDM print a model cheaper, but you can't match the level of detail possible.

Look at this video.. there is no way that you can approach this level of detail (and moving wheels!) with ABS/FDM

Hey Daniel! Thanks for sharing your experience and thoughts on our cost structure. I took a look at your model costs and it looks like you may have been interested in our Professional Plastic material (though I also saw the prices were similar for Premium Versatile Plastic). You're right that the cost for this is a whole lot higher than the cost of printing ABS on your machine at home. Professional Plastic is printed on our HP multi jet fusion machines. Much of the cost has to do with the multi jet fusion technology still being fairly new in the big scheme of the commercial 3D print game, but our pricing structure also covers the labor involved in printing, breaking out, cleaning, and finishing your parts.

As Stony mentions above, we use industrial printers to complete your order. The plastics we produce in our Eindhoven and Long Island City facilities don't compare to ABS in that they produce high detail, have a much smoother surface, and would be suitable for both decorative as well as functional parts thanks to their low risk of dimensional variation.

I can definitely understand that this cost is out of reach for you right now, especially if you were expecting to see prices closer to what you pay for ABS filament. These two materials are pretty different and offer very unique capabilities, they also have different intensities of labor involved throughout the production processes. As you may have seen, we offer a similar (and cheaper) option in Versatile Plastic, which has a similar production cadence but is created via select laser sintering instead of multi jet technology.

It sounds like our services aren't right for you at this time, but if you ever change your mind or want to see if there's anything we can do as far as bulk pricing, our sales or service team would be happy to assist. Just send over an email to service@shapeways.com and we would be more than happy to walk through your options together.