As it stands, the options offered for additional pricing do not capture the situation adequately; I would suggest there needs to be an option for either print time or layer count.
Printing at 100u vs 25u is a 4x difference in both layer height and print time and I would prefer to break the costings down to setup, material usage and print time; print time and material usage are not directly equivalent so it seems unreasonable to just load the material costs to cover this.
Why? Print time is wear and depreciation on the printerā¦
Of course, layer count isnāt going to be accurate until Iāve run the model through the support generation & slicing sw, but itāll give customers an idea in advance.
How are other people handling this?
1 Like
SOC3D
2
My customers and I are simply despising everything having to do with FDM pricing. The issue is that all prints are calculated by a buggy implantation of cura with some default settings. Iāve seen the same model split into pieces get priced at almost half of what the full model was priced at. Which simply makes no sense. The current method of dealing with it, is to deal with it. That is to say I donāt believe this is a priority for 3d hubs.
Guys,
Me again, Correct the āinstant pricingā is absolutely a priority here, however this is a difficult challenge and weāre trying to figure out the best way to approach this. Pricing based on time is something that we hear to be requested more often, but thereās no universal way to calculate it based on the model that the customer uploads.
So your problem seems to be that when youāre printing with lower layer-heights you take longer and thus would like to charge more. You can add a different cost/cm3 for different layer height to compensate for the lost time.
A print time option would be a good add on. That way you wouldnāt be getting screwed on slow materials. I always thought it should be mainly material usage based, not model volume. That way infill has a direct effect on cost, and you can more accurately price your printing.
Now I understand that a lot of people who order donāt know much
about 3d printing or get the idea of what infill is, but thats why you (this is what I mean by a short
have a default. Say 30%, then those customers wont have to worry sidebar)
about picking infill. Even still, if they add an infill option, there could
easily be a short sidebar explaining it.
3D hubs could use the infill information, along with layer height and printer filament size to calculate the cost of a print.
SOC3D
5
Itās not theoretically as difficult as you are claiming. Allowing hubs to customize the cura profiles used for quotes or having your upper management ring up simplify3d and ask for a partnership would both go a long way toward actually trying. Also customers should at bare minimum have a set of radio check boxes called part infill or strength or percentage plastic. They could pick minimal 10% medium 20% high 50% very high 70% or ridiculous 100%. Not to mention the number of orders customers would place if they had a vase mode option. Using a volcano or .8mm nozzle with .64 or .48 layer heights parts can printed extremely strong, fast and cheap.
Thanks for this,
We have considered this solution, but it is indeed a big implementation. For one, think of how many slicing operations we would have to run every time someone uploads a model. We would have to calculate the price based on every Hubās profile on the 3D print page. This would have a significant load on the website not to mention many technical issues that this could create.
I am not saying that itās impossible to solve. This is on our roadmap for sure, but we just havenāt found a āquick winā sort of thing. Believe me - weāre on your side on this one and once we are ready, the changes will be quite significant.
No. Model volume and layer count are not directly proportional, which is why trying to factor it into the materials cost is less than satisfactory.
At a very crude first pass, why not just take the height of the model & give an estimate of # of layers so the customer has an idea of the cost - I already have to add material for the support generation, at least if there were some clear indication to the customer that these are factors in the cost it wouldnāt be as much of a shock to them.
(BTW - my focus is more on SLA than FDM, where ending up with a 50 hour print is possible, although far from satisfactory)
