Pricing Transparency Update #2

What orientation is used to calculate this? When i reorient the model this volume doesn't change altough it should. Reorienting also doesn't change the price. This is contradicting the info text on the orientation tool where you can read:
"Use the arrows to set an orientation for the 3D print, which affecs the price and surface quality."

What is the price / volume, price / machine space, price / support structure?

Thank the printing gods!
So glad material volume is back (it should not have been taken away in the first place).
Thanks for the update.

@avim: Still not good enough, mate. Those numbers are worthless without any indication of the costs associated with each factor.

I was wondering what exactly was "new"? Still no baseline per-CC/mm numbers or ratios to guide us. Seems like it's time to play the "upload test models, reverse-engineer the formula, publish to SW's embarrassment" game again.

@avim: The system used to tell us how much of the cost was attributable to each factor. What can we do to restore that information?

Thank You!!! Yippee!! Hooray!! Eureka!! I'm in the middle of several designs, and this will greatly help in making the designs efficient.

Avi, I have to call your bluff on this - exactly how will the competition use the figures against you? Will the owners of i-beam-it-up sit round a table in a darkened backroom, lit by a single naked bulb, plotting in hushed voices how they will undercut SW by 10% on the wax support? The costs will be what they are, and nobody is in any position to steal your designer-base from under you based solely on price-components because they don't have your global reach, nor your USP of an easy-to-use designer upload system and "shops" with SW doing all the heavy lifting on the printing/packing/shipping. I think you are being too paranoid about the details of pricing, possibly because business schools all teach as a matter of course that you have to hide everything from "the competition" like it's the Cold War.

While we don't need to how much you pay your suppliers for the plastic (your deal with the supplier is your business, and rightly so), we do need to know how much you are charging us for it in $/CCs so we can decide if a model of X CCs volume will be affordable enough to be worth the effort of designing. And more important, we need to know the ratio of cost between plastic and support wax when deciding if it is worth the hassle of hollowing out models by making them multi-parts, with whatever cost implications there are with expanded footprint on a low-rise model versus a solid compact model with taller height. Look at the various wheels-sets I've uploaded - I need the plastic/wax and footprint/height ratios etc to determine which layout is most cost-effective because a too-expensive model simply won't sell, and if they don't sell SW and I don't make any money. After all, 3D print designs are NOT like any other item on the supermarket shelf where all that counts is the final sticker-price - we don't design the cornflakes so don't need to know what percentage of the cost is picking grain vs baking vs packing. For us to make affordable products for you to sell we need to understand the factors that make one design more expensive than another for the same final product. We know SW is looking to entice bigger customers with bespoke deals on large print-runs, and how much you offer as a discount to them is again your business not ours, but I fail to see the harm in showing the "full-price" costs that us smaller designers have to accept.

@barkingdigger

Exactly! And this brings us back to square one when I started asking about where the pricing had gone.
I still don't understand why SW doesn't seem to understand that the designers selling products on the SW platform (and funding the SW company) really do need to be able to estimate what a product would cost before completing the design.
As I've said before, I'm super small on here but did gain some traction making designs for people. All that was based on the ability to provide a good cost estimate to my customers before going ahead finalizing a design.

I've had to stop doing any kind of customer designs. It's dead and will not ever be possible again due to the hidden details.

I lost a side gig and you (SW) lost out in the end too. It's business 101 guys. Please, get your act together again.

I think you will stay at square one with (SW)! I'm not sure either what they are trying to provide us Shop Owners. I'm in to the miniatures in plastic and the cost is just there! most customers don't want to put out that high price for a small piece of plastic. So it square one. I've been here for 6 year and it still the same no future! Not like you I don't really need the estimate up front you get what you see. More detail more cost!

Those same competitors can reverse engineer the SW formula or at least "good enough" idea to make it work as some of this group do, maybe even an easier time reverse engineering if there are some back end cost that we don't know about. If your giving a good product at a fair price no need for secrecy. If the competition is under pricing but SW is only breaking even, let them sell at a loss. No legal way to get rich while losing money.

Wow, 2 weeks and no SW response.
Im surprised they didnt lock the thread and request it be handled in private messages.

@avim @gregorykress

Still no transparency in the pricing formulas? Not even a hint of the relationship in price between the three axes, machine space, and support material? What are you afraid of?

Don't you understand how you are hurting sales by hiding these formulas from us? I have to know whether it is more cost-effective to print a fully-assembled model or break it into sprued-together parts and lay them as flat as possible. Shapeways' intransigence on this issue is reprehensible. Right now I have a customer waiting on a model while I blindly experiment to try to find the least-expensive option for him.

You are not being a good business partner, Shapeways.

Recently I have uploaded a model consisting of 3 times the same packed (sprued) item:
For white processed the costs are a little bit higher then 3 x the costs of the single one.
For smooth fine the costs are 4 times higher ...

Think the new algorithm has maneuvered in a dead end ....

Buying more normally needs to result in cheaper prices, which needs to be reflected in the print cost algorithm or (better and easier) in the order sheet.

Woody64

So, today, I updated two of my oldest models, which pre-dated the per-part cost and sprued them together.

The algorythem siad they were now taking up more machine space (?), and though the part count was down, the price changed barely at all. I experiemented with not putting sprues on, and the difference in cost was minimal (like a 10-20p on a model around £20).

The lack of guidence here is not helping me, you, or our mutal customers; at the moment, today's experiment suggests that it is not WORTH me trying to sprue things together, because the pence I save isn't enough to pay for my time to actually be doing it.

So, genuine question: do you NOT want me/us to put multi-part models on sprues? Because it will certainly make my life a lot easier if I don't have to spend the time to do that. If the algorythm is set up to calculate the bounding box around each part, and not the whole model now such that you can, I don't know tessalate stuff into the gaps or whatever, I'm happy for to pay 20p more for me to do less work and you to do more - but it would be nice to have some sort of clue. Because trying to experiment to find out what configuration of any given model you would prefer me to use (as defined by your pricing) is wasting my time.

What, exactly, do you want us to do, guys and girls of Shapeways?

("Spend more than we need to" is not a valid option.)

Since SW has experimented the continuous pricign increase, my business has fallen from 1000$ per month to 400$ per month. Number of sales from 400 to 150... If all this has been planned, it is clearly a suicide for designers, and for SW also. So, now what's up?

Here us a transparency update on our number of sales, comparing with last year:
Feb 15 '18 => 831
Feb 15 '19 => 466 = -43.92%
Mar 15 '18 => 720
Mar 15 '19 => 352 = -51.11%
Apr 15 '18 => 673
Apr 15 '19 => 361 = -46.36%
May 15 '18 => 618
May 15 '19 => 410 = -33.65%

Nothing else to say.......

I usually try not to chime in on these types of discussions but I want to give a different datapoint. I know that the price increases were hard to swallow for many designers, myself included. I am seeing a drop in the total number of sales also. It is not near on the order that everyone is reporting here. One thing that is different and I believe a contributing factor to my drop in sales, I took the sales increases as an opportunity to increase my markups, So when I compare actual monies made between last year and this year there are no losses. There is no growth either. But people are absorbing the cost increases and business is trending upward again. Of course designing for a niche market, I have never had the large number of parts sold per month, usually only averaging between 175 - 200 items per month, When I compare year over year, I have seen three years of growth and about a 5% drop in the most recent totals. In my case for the four years my shop has been open November - May is the worst time (my items are basically seasonal) so it is hard to compare those numbers as they fluctuate every month, sometimes drastically.

I am also wondering what everyone has done about getting the word out on their items. I know that my a few of Shapeways pages dominate the google page rankings, but since my estimate is Shapeways in total only has about 2M unique visitors a month and growth appears flat for them, without outside help, it is hard to move up on the search engine pages, and that is where the bulk of the people coming to my Shapeways pages are being referred from. If it isn't on Amazon, the masses then search Google, at least in my experience.