Road To Major Fud Improvements Starts With Repricing

I'm finding the machine space formula a bit confusing. Does this mean the first 1.45 cm is free, and then we pay $0.06 (in FUD) X Footprint X Height above that 1.45 cm height? If not, what exactly does it mean and how is it calculated?

Truly understanding how this works may allay some concerns, or possibly spawn new ones... you never know, it's a bit of a feeding frenzy here right now.

Still waiting for the old/ new cost sheet on my models, as are most of us... this info will at least give us something to go on regarding impact.

Thanks,

Steve Hunter

for exemple https://shpws.me/NbfI 40 parts = 40 $, plus material and fotprint and support and 2.50 $ for model.
now 17.42 $ then ? like 46 $ ? sprue lol parts to litle tine for that sprue . cage = more support material more material at al more footprint = more problems.
1 $ per part is bann tiny lose parts ( after print work for shapeways) ok its a lot of work with tiny parts but shapeways advertises it.
In my opinion it has to do with it, they have accelerated the production.
Which was not necessary. And now they do not come after it and try to re-charge the more cost by high item prices.

Yep - clarification on Machine Space would be nice! There's a strange "hat" symbol that I always thought was the logical "and" function, lurking between (Height) and 1.45 - does this mean we multiply 0.06 x footprint x (Height and 1.45), or is it an accident and we're meant to multiply Height x 1.45? "Hat" logic symbols aren't really welcome in straight algebraic equations...

(I was trying to see if the theoretical 283x50x5mm slab might be cheaper if printed on its side, with a footprint of 1415, but the Machine Space component of the abstract maths has me stumped.)

Anyone from SW care to chime in?

Oh, forgot to mention, if 70% of my models get cheaper (thus less profit for SW) and 30% get too expensive to sell, how does SW stay afloat? Answers on a postcard!

The ^ usually means "raised to the power of". You usually see it like x^2 meaning x squared or as cm^3 when you talk about volume.

Mark

^ is the exponent symbol, so it's height to the power of 1.45
so
5mm^1.45 =10.3
10mm^1.45 = 28.2
20mm^1.45 = 77

That is most definitely going to crush the cost calculation on some of my HO scale structures and car bodies. I know my store and models are just a handful compared to some of those on here, but this rollout really sucks, as i have no way of knowing accurately what the impacts on my models are going to be.

https://www.shapeways.com/product/DJBSY2P2B/cabin-d-model-full-levers-ho-scale?optionId=57727194
https://www.shapeways.com/product/J...ric-car-body-shell-ho-scale?optionId=56473296

I'll join the chorus on deaf ears that there needs to be a transition period, between where the new price information is available for everyone to see, and comes active. I'm placing an order this week for myself on the assumption that the parts i've designed could get more expensive next week, and my May payout mostly covers what i want to order now, but won't if the prices go up. I'd rather take the risk that i overpay now than find i can't afford the models next week.

-Stephen

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.

Thanks, I was wondering if this was the meaning, but if so it is extremely uncommon- if ever used in North America. After 30+ years in engineering in Canada, I have never encountered this notation. It must be a European convention.

Our convention is to simply put the exponent in superscript.

Thanks,

Steve

Yeah - must be a weird local notation thing. I was taught superscripts back when dinosaurs shared the lunchroom...

That test-slab works out about $5 cheaper if stood up on its long edge rather than printed flat. Curious...

Can't wait to see the effect on my models, seeing as I have little notion of what orientation SW has chosen to print them in at the moment! (Can't run the numbers without knowing for sure what counts as "height"...) Then again, we also have no idea what support is needed on complex shapes (beyond the 2.8mm minimum under the footprint) without the SW software adding it for us first, so DIY calculations are meaningless. I think we will need to have access to tools that show those earlier "Wax-Shaded" isometric views that Andrew(?) posted earlier in this thread, and give us figures for total wax volume as part of the stats on the model edit page, which needs to update whenever we tweak the promised orientation button. Seems a bit of a tall order for SW to get it all ready by next week, if they cannot even calculate and distribute the all numbers for us designers/shop-owners prior to launch based on existing static orientation!

Oh, and those lovely wax diagrams and the whole discussion of "bathtub" printing vs "dome" orientation need to go in the material specs sheet so they don't get lost as this thread gets old...

The caret ^ notation is used often in programming languages and things like Excel and Access formulas. It's just a different way to write a superscript.

Anyhoo, I got a spreadsheet with a sampling of some 30 products from my store, and 27 of them went down in price. The average drop was by 26%, with a few dropping by half. So I'm feeling more optimistic about this change, even though I still feel that the rollout of this thing could have been handled a whole lot better.

So far, after going through several of my models, I'm liking what I'm seeing, with everything indicating significant cost reductions and the opportunity to increase markup while having markedly lower prices.

Of course I can't include wax volume, but I have a good idea of its impact, and this change should be good for business- driving increased volume for both my shop and SW. I'd rather sell many less expensive models than fewer more expensive ones. Reliable sales volume is a very good thing...

Of course, I never include more than one part in a model, being a firm believer in spruing parts after so many years in industry, so the $1 per part isn't a consideration in my line. I can understand the worry it is causing for others.

Tomorrow I'll be looking at some of my bigger models. For instance, the exponential height consideration on machine volume may hurt my S scale car kit sales, but we'll see. The other lower costs may well cancel that out.

Fingers crossed... looking forward to official pricing info...

Thank you for being willing to take this step into lower prices, SW. It has to be a decision fraught with frayed nerves, but it had to happen. I'm sure once word gets out, and the two following improvements are in place, you will see some very exciting growth.

Steve Hunter

But how do you show superscript in plain text? Answer: you can't, hence the use of the ^ symbol

Mark

One of shapeways' advantages IMHO has been the simplicity of the cost formula, making it easy to keep an affordable price point in view while modeling. Also of note is that you are changing your prices in the midst of unresolved concerns about material quality - or is part of the message here that you have been deliberately abusing the printers to offer competitive pricing ?

When you had updated the table in first post, can you please also update the last part: "Examples of changed prices (provided by Stony Smith Design’s)"

I wonder how prices changed after this new update with seemingly "randomly changed" parameters.

In best case:
current price - new price - newest price

Thanks in advance

Thanks for catching the detail. Prices updated to the original post.
Here's the change history with
Current prices ? First announced prices ? Upcoming prices

ArroWedge Container Load - HOscale
https://www.shapeways.com/product/LF83JXZEM/
$82.92 ? $68.98 ? $66.28

Bucyrus WB150B Crane - Nscale
https://www.shapeways.com/product/6FP4RQTW8/
$44.52 ? $23.93 ? $22.51

Carousel - Zscale
https://www.shapeways.com/product/PSGJQJ8JY/
$15.10 ? $11.20 ? $10.90

Flatcar Load - Fraction Tower - Nscale
https://www.shapeways.com/product/Y6YH9ZX6S/
$22.02 ? $42.26 ? $40.68

Just as I've said before -- it would have been much more helpful to designers and shop owners if the new 3D tools were available prior to the implementation date of the new pricing model. Even though we now have some sense of how pricing will be affected, there is still no way for us to tweak and rework specific models and see what the impact is. Some models might have such a small change in cost that it isn't worth the time to rework them, while others would be very much worth the effort.

I, too, do this as a hobby, but I don't like making people unhappy and I would very much like to be able to deliver great products at cheaper prices to my fans (part of my value proposition is that I only mark up my models by $1, no matter how large, small, complex, etc., and they know this). So while I appreciate that Andrew took the time to sample my models and send me the CSV with the differences, that still is not as useful as actually having the 3D tools available so that I could start reworking models prior to the new pricing formula going live.

I see the frustration, so Can we have usable web pages, not hidden, disappearing information please.