Per Cubic Inch

(Photo by alles-schlumpf)

The MakerBot prints in ABS plastic, which you can buy from MakerBot Industries at eight dollars a pound, or about thirty cents per cubic inch.  This is less than one tenth of the cost of commercial 3D printing technologies I’ve looked at.  It’s about one percent the cost of having Shapeways do it.  (Using the Shapeways Cost Script reveals how wonderfully cheap this makes things.)

Now, these commercial technologies do buy you a few things, most importantly support materials and higher resolution.  A typical commercial printer can get down into feature sizes the current generation of MakerBot can only dream of.  But the pricing of MakerBot, and of the parts it makes, is important.

It’s important because the price difference is so very very stark.  One tenth the cost of production and one tenth the cost of ownership isn’t just less, it’s different.  A ten percent price break means you win out over the competition and sell more 3D printers.  A ninety percent price break means you sell printers to people who never would have remotely considered buying one otherwise.  Since the cost break extends to the price of material, they will also print things they never would have considered printing.

At these prices, I can think of a number of things which become cheaper to print than buy, many of which are already on Thingiverse: gear motors, plastic safety covers for outlets, pen holders (to say nothing of custom pen holders), project cases, pocket computer styluses, gaming dice, and so on.  The list is actually pretty long, I’d wager.  There is a time and energy cost of this sort of production: in most cases, models of anything more complex than the funnel will require post-processing.  I haven’t worked the numbers, but assigning a dollar value to the time one spends sanding plastics down will corrode the price break pretty readily.  But there is still a price break.

Having printed 3D objects make up a significant fraction of one’s semi-durable goods might not pay for itself very quickly, or with zero effort, but the very fact that it can even happen is a pretty meaningful change in the landscape.