How will Sculpteo’s options impact my 3D printing cost?

Posted By Charles Desjonqueres on Aug 24, 2016 | 0 comments

If you have a 3D printing project, you surely had the opportunity to study the 3D printing techniques, materials, finishes, options, and tools Sculpteo offers, and knowing the constraints your project must comply with, maybe you already know which options suit you best! But how can you exactly know the impact of these options in term of price?

Sculpteo offers a direct, interactive pricing tool: once you’ve uploaded your 3D file, you can easily choose various options of materials, finishes, delivery modes, that will suit your application best, but also modify the price of your 3D print. The modified price will appear automatically. In this article, we will try to show you how the different options can impact the 3D printing cost. Examples are better than a thousand explanations, so we will use three objects that benefit from our options in different ways!

Object 1: Your new pair of glasses

Glasses are often very expensive, but still a quite fragile object… Isn’t it frustrating to pay so much for something that is so easy to break? In this case, 3D printing can be a good option to produce something cheap, and easily reproducible.

Imagine you just broke your last glasses, and that you have an urgent need of a new pair. If you have the design for your new pair, you can make us produce it very quickly with our Express option! To get this premium service, chose the material “white plastic” and the “Express” option. In most cases, you will be delivered within 48h. Since your product will have a higher priority in our production flow, your product will be somewhat more expensive.

You would like your object to have a better aspect, to be smoother and glossier, and you are ready to pay a little more for it? Join our beta program and try our “smoothing beautifier” option! First chose the material “white plastic”, and then “smoothing beautifier” in the available finishes. The price will be slightly higher, due to the necessary additional labour.

Here is a short table to summary the different prices:

Don’t hesitate to try these options directly on the design of these glasses!

Object 2: Repairing your Washing machine

3D printing has a huge interest in spare part production, since brands don’t always sell parts for their products. 3D printing parts have the possibility of giving a new life to an old product, avoiding the user to buy a whole new one, while the missing part is just a cheap piece of plastic. Let’s imagine that you have in your possession the design for a missing part of your washing machine.

In the case that you want your washing machine to be repaired at the lowest price, and that the material of the missing part doesn’t need too specific thermal or mechanical properties, a good solution can be to chose our white plastic (which is very polyvalent) and the Economic option. This way, we will place your order in our production workflow depending on the available space in our 3D printers, with a lower priority, which means the lead time won’t be guaranteed (10 days in average). To thank you for your flexibility, we will offer you a better price (up to 30% of discount).

On the contrary, if your missing part has a very technical role, you can choose amongst our CLIP resins, which, in spite of being more expensive, have very good thermal and mechanical properties.

Here is a short table to summary the different prices:

Don’t hesitate to try these options directly on this design and see what is the impact on the price!

Object 3: Your artistic Skull

In terms of artistic creation, 3D printing offers a lot of possibilities, since the technique enables the production of complex shapes that might be impossible to make by other means. Let’s take this skull as an example.

Since the mechanical interest of an artistic piece is often limited, the fact of saving matter is rarely opposed to its principal use. So, why not trying our hollowing tool? For designs that contain solid volumes, it will significantly lower the cost by reducing the amount of material used. The hollowing tool will ask you to choose two spots of your design to make holes, so that the inner material can be removed.

What is art without colours? Our 3D printing service offers you various color options. If you own a multicolored design, print it as it is with our multicolor material. You can also choose to print your design in plain color. After having chosen the plastic material, you can chose to dye your object (8 colors available). This options enables you to buy a cheap coloring, with the same porous aspect as the white raw or polished plastic.
If you want a high quality, more resistant to friction and use color, you can try our new paint option, which will offer you a strong color (14 colors available), a smooth surface, but a slightly more expensive object.

Here is a short table to summary the different prices:

Don’t hesitate to try these options directly on this design and see what is the impact on the price!

Thanks to these 3 examples, we hope you understand how easy it is to modify  your design and choose the options that suit you best, always knowing how much you will pay!

Don’t forget to upload your design, to modify your design with our embedded software tools and to observe the impact on the price of your design!

If you still have questions, you can check our prices page, or contact us directly.