Thanks for the active discussion here.
I have an update to share about model orientation, and want to share our thinking.
Balancing Quality and Price
Hearing your concerns around orienting for quality, we took a closer look at how the new pricing structure impacts quality. We compared results of choosing the cheapest orientation vs. the best quality orientation.
Based on this analysis, we further optimized the pricing structure:
We lowered the support wax cost and
tweaked machine space pricing (
updated prices are in the original post). This update brings the “best quality orientation” closer to the “lowest cost orientation”, while dropping prices even further.
Updated pricing for Support Material and Machine Space Above
Our aim is to create a pricing structure that’s all about transparency and fairness, and that takes us toward a future where you control the outcome. Here some things that impacted the new pricing structure:
Accounting for Wax
Some have raised the question of why they have to pay for the support wax. Wax is a very real part of our production cost. Wax was always part of FUD pricing, but everyone paid for it as part of overall material volume. By studying vast amounts of models, we learned that there isn’t a correlation between the required amount of wax and the model material, bounding box size, or footprint. Some designs just require more wax, and others barely none. Because of this discovery, we didn’t feel comfortable continuing to bake this cost into an overall price (irrespective of design). This didn’t seem fair. So, we decided to break out this as its own price component.
This brings two benefits: First, you gain the ability to use this information in your design process and make decisions with it. And second, you can be certain that the price you’re getting is true to your design.
Next step: Enabling Orientation
This pricing structure builds towards transparency in orientation. We want to hand control over quality back to you, so designers can orient their models themselves, and know exactly what the end result will be for each of their 3D prints. The new pricing structure and the support material visualizations are the first steps towards this goal. We are working to get the orientation tool to you in the coming months.
For now, we will continue to 3D print FUD in the way we always have, keeping the orientation the same as in your previous orders. When we introduce the 3D print orientation tool for FUD, we will enable everybody to set their preferred orientation, which has been one of our community’s longstanding requests. We’re still working out the details and plans around the implementation. There are still a lot of open questions, and we look forward to incorporating your feedback, so please feel free to share your thoughts below.