its like some of you folks never bought a paper printer…
You remember inkjets, right?
They don’t make money on the printer… they make money on the ink.
If everyone refills their own ink cartridges with the cheapest stuff they can find, then the companies that MAKE the printers go out of business. If the business model of profitable consumables is undermined… then the only way for manufacturers to survive is to charge three times as much for the printer.
OR they move to a subscription model like the Carbon printer where you just pay $30k per year to RENT the machine.
Get it?
Additionally, If they let you refill cartridges for as long as you please, sooner or later you will have a valve failure and a huge mess… and perhaps even have to send the printer back for repairs… and guess what kind of threads full of acerbic complaints you would be reading, then? aggravated users griping about how the valve failed and their printer was ruined. And for every “adult” who would stoicly accept responsibility for their own overuse of a rubber valve, there would be two folks demanding a warranteed repair.
Formlabs resin costs are high because those costs subsidize the lower price of the hardware and the costs of the warrantee that they all too often have to make good on because its a complicated machine.
Kvetch all you want about their RESIN being overpriced, maybe they can get by with slightly less margin on resin. Or ask them to SELL empty cartridges you can use in open mode. (and hey- notice that they even OFFER an Open mode?)
But the expiration date is to keep your machine working, and you can just get a new cartridge and POUR the unused resin from the expired cartridge into the new one as you use that resin up.
Or, heck, half of you are designers… try designing a valve that can be relied on for longer and that is almost as cheap to produce as the pinch gasket. And sell the design to Formlabs.
But to be honest- if the reason you want the cartridges to be longer lived is so you can use them to run cheaper resins from companies that don’t even make a printer… Think it through.
I researched before buying the form2- and that their resin costs were high I saw as a selling point.
Because I don’t want to invest in a costly technology where the company that made it is not gonna be around a year or two down the line, because they can’t turn a profit.
it does me no good to undercut the profitability of the Vendors on whom my business relies.
This industry is an ECOSYSTEM. How many printer makers have evaporated already because they tried to cut their margins too thin? How many folks saddled with printers that are no longer supported- with parts you can’t get?
A good tool is worth its cost. And the people who make a good tool deserve to make money on that tool.
I charge a profit for what I do with the Form 2, too.