25% is so high. I get a rush of students submitting giant, usually unprintable, designs around the time of their class final projects. They require more work, a quicker turnaround, and I doubt they’ll be return customers because the class is over.
I’m all for offering a discount to help poor students out but it just becomes so not worth my time to lose 25%. If anything I should be charging more for all the help I have to give in fixing their designs 
We should be allowed to set our hub discount from like 5% to 25%.
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Exactly why I don’t do the fixed student discount. I help a lot of students and I decide on a case by case basis what is appropriate. Usually it comes in the form of me offering my time and in those cases I’m actually giving a much larger discount than 25%. Other situations, where students need a very challenging print out of an expensive material (like PEEK) I cannot offer any discount, as one failed attempt would put me in the red.
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We have the same issues. We get orders from students with very hard parts to print with FDM and we explain to them and upload pictures to make sure they are good with how they look. Some of the parts are impossible to print and if they do print they don’t look the best. If they say they are good with the quality, we ship it to them. When they receive the parts they then give us a bad review! We told them about the quality issues due to the complexity of the parts but they still give us a bad review! 3D Hubs needs to monitor this better. Thanks.
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I agree. In my experiences the student orders often are the hardest to print and they are almost always in a rush. Also the most cancelled orders from the customer side are the ones of students. This in combination with the very high discount makes these orders very unattractive.
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Instead of cutting the price, universities should subsidize the difference
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I, personally, feel the problem falls more on the students for not taking the time to double-check their designs against guides online for “how to design for ____ printing method.” Trust me I took a basic 3D printing course for credits in college and the qty of non-printable designs by in-house professional FDM equipment was crazy… People need to realize that 3D printing is not an end-all be-all do-all and design accordingly.
In the end I get your frustrations but at the same time you got to realize that this is one of the challenges of doing business sadly… people who want stuff done that is unrealistic or done in an unrealistic time frame. I dealt with it a LOT at my old machine shop job so regardless of manufacturing method there is always someone who thinks their impossible design is “so doable!”
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What does this have to do with the student discount? “Non-printable” is subjective. It’s not realistic that a customer knows what is “printable”, as everyone’s capabilities are different. Most of my clients are technical people but know nothing about 3d printing and they shouldn’t have to. Obviously there are limitations but if you require that parts be “designed for _____ printing method” you probably shouldn’t be doing this professionally.
No one is complaining about difficulty alone. We are saying that automatic discounts on these prints isn’t working out for most of us. Aside from the fact that the students are flaky, I have to charge more if a print is difficult or has short deadline. With the student discount it would just look like I’m trying to undo their discount, which is unprofessional. The OP wants more flexibility in this regard, I choose to avoid it altogether.
I agree. It also affects your rankings if you reject work or have to refund a project.
Either universities should subsidize the difference or 3D Hubs should take off 12.5%.
Maybe universities should have a special program with 3D Hubs like you said.
