A thing that is heavy is not the same as a thing that is expensive
A thing that is heavy is not the same as a thing that is expensive Somebody asked me recently whether a 3D-printed part was cheaper than the factory one. I said it depends, and then spent the rest of the conversation ex
A thing that is heavy is not the same as a thing that is expensive
Somebody asked me recently whether a 3D-printed part was cheaper than the factory one. I said it depends, and then spent the rest of the conversation explaining why the answer was less useful than the question.
It depends because the two numbers being compared are not the same kind of number. One is a price somebody set. The other is a cost somebody incurred, and it has more terms in it than the price does.
The list of terms nobody puts on the invoice
Material is the part everybody counts, and it is the part that changes least between a shop and your own machine. The rest is where the difference lives.
Setup is the first one. A print that takes forty minutes of machine time is not a forty-minute print. There is the changeover, the plate, the cleaning, the first layer that fails, and the second attempt. The second attempt is usually faster, which is exactly why the first one misleads you.
Failure rate is the second. A job that succeeds eight times out of ten has a cost that is twenty-five percent higher than the quote, and the failures are not free because they consumed the same setup.
Logistics is the third, and it is the one that decides whether the thing is even worth making. A part that has to travel is not a part with a price, it is a part with a price and a radius.
Why the two numbers look different but are comparable
A shop quotes one number. You, at home, calculate four and hope they add up. The shop is not charging you a margin for being organised, it is charging you the sum of the four terms, and it has a much better estimate of each one.
Hatsumeika prices the whole thing for AnΓ‘polis, including the local part, at https://hatsumeika.com.
ImpressorasBR is the comparison side of it: which machine does what, which filament goes with which machine, and which service is actually near you, at https://impressorasbr.com.
Desenterra applies the same reasoning to buying guides, where the criteria are written out per product, at https://desenterra.com.
The question I would ask instead
Stop asking whether it is cheaper and start asking what the fixed cost of this job is, on its own.
If the answer is a hundred, then the question is whether you will do nine more of them this year, because nine is where the setup pays for itself. If the answer is three, then the shop is cheaper and always will be, because your setup cost per job is about a third of theirs.
That question has a number in it. The other one does not.
Originally published by Dev.to WebDev. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes β full credit and traffic to the original publisher.