They are not giving it away, they are asking a premium for dental resins already. People just try to understand the decision. Why do you need a separate Form 3B when the early 2019 Form 3 at a lower price can do the same job? All they offer extra is a service package. This can be completely separate from the machine.
There is hardly flaming in the thread. People are concerned and like to understand the decision making. It can make these customers upset if they don’t get a decent answer(but just an empty answer which doesn’t tell anything new) from a company they regard highly.
We are not going to buy a Form 3B for the 5 or 10 prints a year that need to be biocompatible. But we would have bought the biocompatible resins if they could be printed on the Form 3 we already have. So we would go to a local company which doesn’t have Formlabs printers and order them there, so FL misses out on money there, but I guess we’re way too small to bother.
We would never buy the service package to get a hot swap, but instead we make sure we have a bit of over capacity. This would be a very bad strategy when you have expensive equipment like a CNC mill of 100k to 1M USD. The FL machines are cheap enough that you just place an extra machine in the lab. But buying a separate one for just a few biocompatible prints makes no sense.
We would also never buy the service package or pro plan for printing tips. If you have the machines for several months and print daily, you know what the limitations are and how to position the prints. There are so many complaints about the pro-plan being slow to respond(and when they respond you get A4 size responses with 5 lines of useful text…), that it doesn’t add any benefit.
What I think(correct me if I’m wrong) is that they want to be taken more serious in the dental market which requires a dedicated machine instead of an ‘allrounder’ and this is their strategy.
But geez, seeing how much they have spammed our email and phone so we would buy the Form 3 and how much marketing is still going on, it looks like there are some shareholders/investors that need to be pleased.