Pricing Guide

Our pricing guide offers outline prices and will help you understand what can influence cost, such as materials, speed and finishing.

To give you an idea of cost comparison for the processes we offer, we have costed up a pawn chess piece (outline prices as of 31 January 2024). The dimensions are: 32.94 x 35.55 x 58mm. The prices below exclude VAT.

What influences the cost?

The outline prices above, are only indicative and the pricing for each process can be influenced by different things. Read on to find out more…

CNC

The costing for CNC machining is different to 3D printing, (3D printing is additive manufacturing, meaning the more solid the part the more expensive). As CNC machining is subtractive manufacturing, we start with a block of solid material and so the more material that is machined off means a higher cost.

The type of material can increase the cost, such as peek which is expensive to purchase. Stainless steel is a hard metal, meaning it takes longer to machine than softer materials such as Aluminium.

The number of operations performed on the part will affect the cost, the more operations you have the higher the cost.

Vac casting

The main cost driver for Vacuum Casting is the manufacturing of the silicone tool required to make the parts. The more complicated the geometry of the part, the longer it will take to set up an SLA pattern for tooling. If the geometry of the part allows, you could have more than one impression in the tool, this would reduce the unit cost of the castings and allow you to make more parts from one tool.

As you would expect, the larger the part the higher the cost.

Undercuts and cores will add additional cost to the tool price as more labour time would be required.

Finally, the material choice and geometry of the part can change the amount of pours you can make from a tool as some materials/designs are more aggressive on the tool.

PµSL

The biggest factor in the cost is the print time of the part. For PµSL, the print time is affected by the height of the part. Although the parts built on the PµSL are very small the build time is much longer than our other 3D printing technologies.

To reduce the unit cost it makes financial sense to fill a platform with as many parts as possible, as when printing, the laser projects the whole build layer on to the build platform in one motion. There is no price difference in the materials we offer.

We don’t offer finishing on PµSL parts therefore that has no price impact.

Polyjet

Each Polyjet platform is charged at £150 plus the cost of material.

We build parts in the best orientation to give the best quality of part which would mean the build time may be longer.

Another factor in higher cost is the volume of the part. A solid part would cost more to print than a hollow part as more material is used.

There isn’t the choice of finishing like SLA.

DLP

Similar to the SLA printing, when costing for DLP parts we take in to account the build time of the print. The part height plays a big part in costs increasing: the taller the build the higher the cost.

As with all 3D printing types, we build parts in the best orientation to give the best quality of part which would mean the build time may be longer. Also, a solid part would cost more to print than a hollow part.

Remember: the DLP printer does not like printing chunky solid parts, even if they fit on the platform!

The more parts you have on the platform the lower the unit cost of the parts.

Express printing can affect the cost

Our Express service means we will run our machines overnight regardless of how many orders we have, if it’s just your order then we will run the machine. This means we have the potential of running machines with only a few parts on, and therefore we must ensure we have allowed for this in our rates for Express orders.

In contrast, if you choose our Economy print speed, we can fill gaps within our platforms so long as the print times don’t affect any Express orders we have scheduled.