Pinshape may be seeing a lot more from me now that shapeways will be changing the way they price their two biggest materials on october 7th (one week notice only? really?). With an emphasis not on the quantity of material but more on the “work” put into making your items. Some people are rejoicing, other like myself are wondering if they can survive.
For those who use shapeways, what are your thoughts? has it changed for the better or worse or somewhere inbetween?
The biggest pain is for those that use multiple items in one file. I create a lot of items that are small and lend themselves to being multiple part/shell files. Jewelry charm sets, ball jointed doll parts… Most of my main sellers are becoming triple and even quadruple in price. Now if I use a sprue to connect all the parts together that does bring the parts down, but it is still adding a bit to the price, plus knowing that there will now be weird cut marks that I can’t always hide, and if I wanted to get it polished some areas would not be able to be polished as the polishing material can’t fit in between the different parts.
While I agree that work should be taken into the pricing along with material cost, this new system is really putting a strain on certain types of models that will no longer be cost effective. Shapeways was not handling those types of items well before the price change and I don’t see it becoming better with a jump in price.
On the plus side single yet larger items like the few human sized cosplay props did drop slightly in price. None as dramatic as some of my smaller multi item files, but at least their is some light to this new stance.
Do you think other printing companies will adopt similar views or is shapeways shooting itself in the head?
I don’t think their is a clear answer, but hopefully some adjustments will be made.