@david_merten that is my point, time is money. Telling someone that it is cheaper to buy diy is only true if you don’t value your time. Also these companies have to value their time. If they don’t they turn all makibox our peachy printer.
Yes you could build a nice printer for $400, yes you can get all of the parts, for that cost, but you will spend at least 5 hours running the bom and shopping. 5-10 doing the design work, 5 hours building, 5 hours debugging… Now you have a printer (maybe) and it cost you 20 hours. If you work minimum wage how much is that ~$200 so the real (opportunity) cost of the printer is at least $600… If you think you’re worth minimum wage. But you are technically proficient, so you probably are worth about 2-3 times minimum wage (at least) so really the (opportunity) cost of the printer is ~$1000.
@Nathan_Walkner so you can’t say that you could build an equivalent printer cheaper than. You can source parts for a printer, but you couldn’t make a business of our building printers for that cost.
Realize you are claiming you can build a printer for cheaper than someone sells it, but you would not be able to make any money doing that as a job… That is a pointless statement. It is like me saying “I could be an iPad for much less” yes I can, but I don’t need to keep the lights on in my factory.
@Nathan_Walkner I am saying your statement is this company doesn’t provide a valuable service because I can build the same thing for cheaper. But you can’t. You can build 1 for yourself for cheaper, but they are not just building a printer they are building a company. So the next time you claim a printer is over priced, remember not everyone is you. Some people don’t want to have the hobby of designing 3d printers. These companies have value, bragging about the price point that you can make a printer for doesn’t add to the conversation.
Patents prevent the sale of goods. An individual could violate these for personal use. As long as you do not distribute you are not competing. 2 no it really doesn’t require high end pick and place machines. You can do bga packages by hand, it just has lower reliability and higher failure rates (I can do about 1 in 10).
There should be no discussion that value customer support adds to the cost of the product is valuable and be necesary. That will drop substantially as the market and software matures, demand grows. We are still in the infancy and there are to many obstacles until this go mainstream, at least for something really valuable for end user. Case in point 2D printers. I’m very sure that support calls are way way bellow what the average 3D printer manufacturer gets proportionally
I can attest to what you say first hand Tom. I worked at one of those companies. At some point it’s just not sustainable.
As a point of reference here - The E3D team is no longer selling an assembled BigBox Printer - for the simple reason it costs way too much to assemble, test and ship it.
Building up assembled 3D Printers takes a lot of time and investment. Not to mention the approvals costs, test equipment and people etc.
Quite a number of 3D printer companies seem to have made a mistake thinking the kit market was dead. Or being destroyed by the Chinese machines. It’s not. The market for kit machines - selling to the right type of customer is now more important than ever.
The BigBox kit price was also way too low on their original Kickstarter, A great bargain for anyone that got hold of one, even if it does take a long time to assemble the machine. It’s still an incredibly good value kit.
The price of assembled machines and also kits will go up this year, not down. It’s going to be an interesting year for the established manufacturers, and a continuing dry patch for sales over the next 18 months.
Hold on tight…
my problem isnt printer manuf like lutz pricing their printers like they do. what i have a problem with is when the clones come out and they want to charge a premium when they have invested little to no time in making the printer better, all while using substandard components.