I built a 3D printing business and ran it for 8 months

- design time earned about $25/hour

- $3666 total revenue

- $3352 in expenses

- ~50 orders fulfilled

- ~3000 hours of logged print time.

This tells the whole story... these numbers are so far off from what they should be that this is not a business, but a charity cosplaying as a business. It's a pity you are going to drop this, I think if you adjust your pricing and become a bit more efficient you can easily make it work. But great you're sharing your numbers, you really just need better customers.

Rules of thumb: 10x on materials, base fee of $3 / hour of print time, $100 / hour design time if < 1000 parts, above that you can start pricing it into the job total.

I wrote this after running a small 3D printing side business for ~8 months. It worked in the sense that I got steady orders and revenue, but every part of the process required me (design, printing, assembly), so it never really scaled beyond my time.

I'm interested how others think about this boundary, at what point does something go from “side project” to “business”? And how do you tell if it’s worth trying to scale vs just leaving as is?

From what I gathered from the article, one of your problems is that you didn’t understand the economics before you launched, and therefore your pricing was disconnected from the true costs. Next time, try to anticipate these by breaking down the various input factors (material, machine wear, design time, desired profit margin, etc). You may get an answer that convinces you it’s not worth it before you invest time.

I wish I could just start a business fixing 3d printers and helping people set up really nice plex servers with hardware transcoding, but there's this pesky mortgage...

Anyway, these posts always make me think of this https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/142eg6r/...

I have a small side business selling 3d prints, creeping up on 2 years old. It's roughly break even, but that's mainly because I rented a space for a studio to do the work in. I mainly sell others' models (either open licensed, or commercially licensed, and intentionally steering clear of others' IP). Slowly I'm building out additional automations to facilitate scaling, but I'm really in no rush. (Day job is great)

This post reads like an invitation to one or more Trademark infringement cases.

Howdy from a former Somervillen (inferred from the photos)!

If you have any interest in doing custom B2C instead of B2B, there's Somerville Open Studios. I did that one year (2019) before we moved to Vermont just before things went to shit in 2020. I also noted that Somerville Open Container Day (aka Porchfest) would be a great time to have something going (a demo maybe?) at our house given the huge foot traffic. I think you'd get a lot more folks passing by rather than the folks already committed to visiting art and craft studios specifically.

Don't let your likely lousy space be a barrier. We had my furniture on display in our living room (aka: our furniture) and I gave people tours of our basement which had my bench, my table saw, and damn little else. People kind of dig it. Small and scrappy is kind of expected for these kind of events.

Good luck if you try to give a go at it from another angle! And if you stick with software, that's cool too.

I enjoyed this writeup. It was interesting to read the perspective of someone starting a 3D printing business without first researching all of the countless 3D printing businesses and trying to duplicate their work. They discovered why doing custom designs and low volume orders doesn't work, but it was more interesting than reading yet another 3D print farm story.

The current meta is to license (or steal) 3D toy models and then market them relentlessly on social media. It's a marketing and social media game most of all. These shops have tens of printers set up in a room printing plates full of little toys, a web shop or social media shop to pick colors, and then they spend their days monitoring printers and packing up orders. There's not much 3D printing or design fun in the job because it's mostly a social media and logistics operation.

i too wanted to purchase 5-6 3D printers and start a business - basically my version of goose farming after i leave the software dev space for the greater good of mankind :)

I recently had 3d printed part made by jlcpcb, it was 110x100x25mm resin print, 60ml for €5 plus €12 shipping. https://imgur.com/a/ctOTImN

"On the economics, things worked."

I would argue that they didn't. 25$ per hour for custom design work seems very low, I understand maybe trying to get a customer base but at that rate you are just going to get repeat customers who want the same low cost labor. Where 3d printing is great is if you can create truly custom things, not knick knacks that can be copied and mass produced by someone else. Selling the plastic itself is a no go, you have to go mixed materials, mixed colorways, things that take time to assemble, and then charge out the wazoo for custom work because the people that really want the custom stuff, will find a way to pay for it.

I'm in Europe and ordered some dungeons and dragons figurines from ironshieldarmy based in Poland. They print them to order, optionally do the required assembly and base layer of paint.

I had the impression that they're busy full-time but I have no idea really. They have some nice designs though.

I'm surprised they're completely focused on DnD though. Hopefully they have another business doing war hammer, etc. (although maybe everything in war hammer is copyrighted?)

This is so ai-written it is hard to take serious. You figured out the trick to making tall skinny things stable? Weight or a wide base?