Update On Fine Detail Plastic Pricing

Hi everyone, thank you for your patience as we’ve been refining our pricing formula for Smooth and Smoothest Fine Detail Plastic. As of today, we are ready to share with you information about our new formula as well as the ability to see what your new prices will be using this formula. The new prices will take effect on Monday, April 29, 2019.

Below is a set of FAQs to help prepare you for the update:

What will my products and models cost with the new pricing formula?

We have provided a tool for pricing comparison that allows you to download a spreadsheet with your impacted items, with current pricing and new pricing listed side-by-side. For shop owners, this tool can be found on the Shop Settings page within your account and is designed to help you analyze the pricing impact to your store. For everyone else, you can access it directly here.

Please note that you must be logged in to access the download and it may take over a minute to finish processing your prices and download. Please be patient as the process completes.

How does this affect my markup?

The pricing change does not affect the markup. You can still set your own markups, make changes to products individually, or use the Pricing CSV Wizard to update markups in bulk.

Will “grandfathered” products be impacted?

Yes. All fine detail plastic products will be moved to this new formula, including previously grandfathered products. With this update, grandfathered pricing will have ended.

What are the pricing components in the new formula?

The pricing formula is based on the following components, all of which add up to create a custom price for your model:

• Material Volume - the amount of material needed to 3D print your product
  
  
• Support Volume - the amount of support material required to 3D print your product
  
  
• Number of parts - a part is a piece of a model that can be separated from other pieces of the model
  
  
• Production - associated production costs including labor; quality control; machine maintenance; general utilities; and other supporting services required to 3D print your product

With this update, models will need to meet the following minimums:

• Minimum price per model
  
  
  • $7.50 for Smooth Fine Detail Plastic
    
    
  • $10 for Smoothest Fine Detail Plastic
    
• Minimum price for Parts Bounds Volume*
  
  
  • $0.35 per cm3 for Smooth Fine Detail Plastic
    
    
  • $0.58 per cm3 for Smoothest Fine Detail Plastic

* Parts Bounds Volume is the bounding box volume for each part of a model added together. This method removes empty space between your models so you don’t need to move models closer together to get a lower price. Models must meet this minimum, which is calculated by multiplying the Parts Bounds Volume by the rate listed above.

Why did you make this change?

We are sensitive to adjusting prices and are aware that this is never easy on customers. However, we do need to make sure that our prices reflect the true cost of doing business and allow us to further invest and innovate in our business. As always, if you have policy questions about why we feel it is necessary to make this change, you can reach out to me personally at avim+pricing@shapeways.com.

Why did this change take longer than other materials?

We encountered some technical challenges with changing this material’s formula and wanted to thoroughly test our changes to make sure it was working properly before deploying. This took roughly a month longer than we originally anticipated. My apologies for any inconvenience this delay caused.

Will this be the last price change to this material?

From time to time, we will need to update our pricing to account for cost increases, business needs, and the competitive landscape. Moving forward however, we feel that the material is now priced more appropriately to account for our business needs and unless that changes, any increases in this material will be incremental.

How can I get in touch if I need help?

You can flag critical issues by sending us a spreadsheet highlighting the issues to pricingsupport@shapeways.com.

Some of my prices went down. Is that a mistake?

No, the new algorithm moves cost away from shorter model types and into taller model types to account for our actual costs in generating each model. So some members will see a direct benefit from this new algorithm.

I'm upset about the policy decisions behind this change. How do I let you know about it?

I want your feedback! Although the changes here are necessary for Shapeways to continue it's business, I understand how this will complicate things for those of you whose prices went up. Please email me directly at avim+pricing@shapeways.com. Even if I can't help you directly, I want to hear about how this change impacted you.

Lastly, a polite request. I know that some of you will be upset with how your prices were impacted. However, please do not use this thread to complain generally about Shapeways pricing policies - you have my email above and I'm even happy to speak with you by phone. Let's keep this thread open for discussion of unexpected issues / bugs / questions only, so our developer team and user base can track and respond to all issues.

Thanks!

Thanks - I look forward to seeing that and hope if it's a bug we can resolve it quickly.

I believe that we quote our price at the cheapest orientation regardless, so changing the orientation wouldn't change the price.* In the case of that particular file, I would send an email to pricingsupport@shapeways.com to find out what caused the large bump in price, in case it's a bug.

* Fixing this issue so we always quote at the orientation set by the customer instead of pricing it at the cheapest orientation and eating the cost difference is something we do plan to address in the near future.

The price is correct. Your model is hitting the minimum price for parts bounds volume. Your volume is 10.496 x 1.7 x 8.79 cm = 156.84 cm3 * $0.35 = $54.89

Your are only charged for the cheapest orientation.

The new pricing model does not charge differently for user set orientations. We'll monitor our support material usage and see if this works best. Ideally we wouldn't need to reprice things for orientation. The new part bounds volume calculation covers a part of that difference.

This is possible. Our first cut at this formula really penalized multipart kits too much, so we tried to correct that. I can imagine some cases where a kit of n models could be cheaper than the separate models. Maybe think of it as a bulk discount for ordering more things. It's not ideal but pricing that was exactly equal for single uploads and as a kit made for really expensive kits.

I can understand how you could read that page that way and we should make that page clearer. Let me try and explain what's going on. We calculate the support material required for a model in 6 orientations. For any particular orientation the height is a factor. We then take the orientation with the least support and charge you that.

In a lot of cases this is also the best orientation to print. The less support touching your model the better. There are cases where another orientation is better(and you can still set that), but for now we are not charging for it. Our analysis makes us think it's not the primary driver of costs. If we learn over time we are wrong then we'd have to adjust.

For the rest of your questions I'll just say we are comfortable with the analysis work we have done and that the pricing model reflects our current production costs. As those costs change we will update the formulas.

I agree that a guide to minimize prices would be helpful here. My team will work on it.

With the new pricing formula for Fine Detail Plastic, models that are tall with low density will see larger price increases (%) than other models in your model library.

If you have a model that hits this criteria and want to reduce cost when printing with Shapeways, you may consider making the model smaller or breaking it into parts. Another option is switching to Versatile Plastic. The difference in printing technology between Versatile Plastic and Fine Detail Plastic allows us to price Versatile Plastic more competitively for models of this kind.

Tall low density models (like I imagine a container crane would be) are prohibitively expensive to print in Fine Detail Plastic. We lose money on each print because the models take up so much machine height, which wastes printable space in the tray around it and machine time. We have to pass that cost back to the customer. We cannot print at a loss. I know that will hurt your ability to sell that model if you make no changes to it, but hopefully my suggestions above on how to reduce the cost will help you. And I also hope you understand why these changes are necessary.