Appreciate the feedback. Very interesting business model with the ride share etc… also hearing from someone else hoping to just “break even” with this system. Haha
I am still in the search for someone else actually “making money” running production parts for other people. I don’t think it is possible with this system as it currently is, with cost of material but also interesting that you mention a subscription discount for at least helping to do so, for powder, as Formlabs never once mentioned this in all our discussions. However, they have shipped plenty of free powder due to all the issues with this system running Nylon 12 GF…so maybe they still aren’t confident in their Nylon 12 GF to offer something like that.
Outside of our own parts, direct to consumer, we do have one steady outside contract to build parts but it only works because this person sells an entire “kit” of manufactured items and we are just one component of that. So we only make it work in this niche scenario because we are charging full price on our component at “break even” cost on that part for this person to have it in his kit. So it is truly not a great scenario of manufacturing wholesale to an outside company…
I have spoken to so many people now, in the past two years, who had hopes that this was a production part running system… I actually heard the story of two companies who started a company in hopes of manufacturing around this system to later go under as they realized this was not a reality. One of these was in the prosthetics industry which ran into issues. I find it funny that Formlabs had this possibility up on their website early on when we purchased this system as a use case…but you don’t see that use case advertised much anymore…
I will fire this thread up in General Discussions as I beleive it is important for folks researching this system to have expectations of what it is for. Hopefully in the future it gets there…but it currently is not a manufacturing possibility outside of building your own in-house parts and/or obviously it is great for prototypes.
Appreciate all the feedback and will let you all get back to discussing what I created this initial thread for…which is for faulty Fuse’s.