Kickstarter is where you try to get a new product out to market and ask for financing from prospective buyers. FormLabs has grown beyond the Kickstarter phase, and is a solvent company that should be able to pay for development and production, or at the very least obtain a loan to do so. If the argument is that they wanted to see the demand before going to mass production, they could have very well done so by offering a pre-order “buy-in” of $100 or less.
Charging full price for the item is simply NOT DONE. I work for a computer manufacturer, and whenever we develop something new, we also gauge the demand by showing prototypes to our established customer base, but we never charge them up front for pre-orders.
The only time that such actions would be deemed acceptable would be when you enter a contract with a customer to make a custom product and the customer has exclusivity on it, since they paid for the design up front, even then, they don’t pay for the full amount. There is usually a deposit for the NRE fees, a another payment somewhere down the middle of the project after meeting certain milestones, and the remainder of the payment is due on shipment or delivery.
The concept of pre-purchasing is something that has only come into existence with the advent of Kickstarter and the likes. And that is designed to get a company off the ground, it’s not designed to be the modus operandi.
I put in a pre-order for the F2 a week after it was announced, and after various delays received it about 6 months later, with my 5k deposit held the entire time. At the time I found this extraordinary and annoying.
I’ve since come to peace with it because I don’t know if FL would be able to make these products without taking the full pre-purchase amount for pre-orders. Assuming that’s the trade-off, I’d much rather have the Form2 exist as a product than have that money in the bank for those 6 months. The same goes for the Wash and Cure: if the pre-payment funds are the capital they need to build the devices, then I’m willing to provide them.
I don’t feel this is actually the case with how long the company has been in service.
That being said I have gotten a chance to play around with my form Wash and it has given me the driest parts ever. Sucks that the outside has been scratched after waiting so long on it. I am still waiting to hear back form FL about that.
I have not received any information on the delays. Just received the Form Wash and still waiting on the Form Cure. Has the Form Cure started shipping for anyone? An update would be greatly appreciated.
We ordered ours Sep 15th, it arrived Friday Dec 1st (we’re in Canada). No Form Cure or LT tanks yet.
(We’ve used ours 2 times; it’s crashed once. The display and button became unresponsive, and the machine needed power off/on. I hope there’s a way to upgrade firmware on these).
Edit: Also, after sleeping for a few hours, it was again completely unresponsive, needing power cycling to get the display to light up again.
I ordered the Cure on May 8th, I had one email on September 27th to say “Form Cure units will begin shipping in early November.” Since then, not a peep. I don’t expect accurate predictions of when it will appear, but the occasional update to say they haven’t forgotten about the order entirely would be nice.
Yeah the Cure delivery date has been pushed back from an estimate of 01/2018 in october this year to 04/2018 now, and if I’m not mistaken the first estimate for preorders was around the begining of Q4/2017.
This is indeed unacceptable, especially given the fact that the full amount was billed in advance AND it’s almost impossible to get in touch with Formlabs on that matter. I am also working for a startup which sells hardware products and I know production delays can happen but this is not standard at all, this is not a kickstarter campaign anymore it’s a proper product from a proper company, and this is definitely not a complicated product to make (if it is, it has been badly engineered… or way understaffed by the look of the numerous engineering job postings)
Needless to say we are in the process of canceling everything and ordering a CureBox from wickedengineering which despite not being “in stock” has a lead-time of 2 weeks. This will be more expensive for us as we are in Europe and they don’t have warehouses outside of the US but hey, better than not having a product a year after announcement (which is what 04/2018 means)
Interesting. I guess you have a lot of meny to spare. But let me see if this changes your mind about this:
From the time the Wash & Cure were announced (April 2017), until now (Dec 2017), Dow Jones Industrial went from 20,940 to 24,362, or approximately 16%. If you had invested the $1200 + tax and shipping, you would have had a $200 gain (give or take).
Sure, another possibility is that FL is able to sell the the Wash & Cure (together) for $200 less because they can take the full amount at the time of the pre-order. In any case, it’s always possible to wait for them to be in-stock and ready-to-ship, for those who don’t want to part with full amount months in advance.
I work in the computer manufacturing field and we have many systems developed here in the US or in Taiwan and manufactured in China. If these are made in China, and I’m pretty sure they are, the BOM for these is probably less than $200 for the cure and less than $150 for the wash. Labor in China is dirt cheap and if they are assembled there, it costs about $5-10 each (or less).
If I actually had one and could disassemble it, I could probably give a much more accurate assessment., but the numbers above are very generous. So the prices that Formlabs sells these for, are high so they can recover their NRE/design fees and tooling costs in a very short time.
Let’s say that each of these units has had about $50K in design fees, and another 60K in tooling, so they need to recover about $110K. If the profit margin is about $300, they only need to sell about 360 units to recover their investment.
Bottom line is that they didn’t want to invest their own money, they got all the interested buyers to put up they cost, so they’re playing with house money so to speak.
