Bulk and production runs

Printing the same part many times is priced the same way as printing it once — billable grams at the material's rate — with a discount on the line and no tooling to pay for. This page covers the discount tiers, where in the product they actually apply, how a run is spread across the fleet, what to expect for 50, 500 and 1,000 parts, and the point at which you should be talking to a moulder instead of us.

Discount tiers#

curl -s -X POST https://x3dstudios.com/api/price \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"bboxMm":{"x":60,"y":40,"z":25},"material":"pla","quality":"standard","quantity":10}'

{
  "grams": 34,
  "printHours": 1.65,
  "materialCost": 4.08,
  "machineCost": 0,
  "shipping": 7,
  "baseFee": 0,
  "perUnit": 4.08,
  "subtotal": 36.72,
  "total": 43.72,
  "currency": "USD",
  "material": "pla",
  "quality": "standard",
  "quantity": 10,
  "customColor": false,
  "pricePerGram": 0.12
}

Read that carefully: perUnit is the undiscounted unit price, $4.08. The discount lives in subtotal — 10 x $4.08 x 0.90 = $36.72, not $40.80. The same part at quantity 5 comes back at $19.38, and at quantity 1 at $4.08. Note also that /api/price works from the bounding box alone, which is a solid-block upper bound; a real quote is measured by slicing the actual model, so the ordered price is usually lower.

Quantity against approach#

How a run is spread across the fleet#

There is no batching magic. One printer runs one plate at a time, so a run of N parts is N plates spread over however many machines are productive, and the run finishes when the last plate does. That is why lead time is arithmetic rather than a promise.

1. Throughput is measured, not assumed. The farm takes the last 200 completed jobs, turns each into grams per hour, throws out the junk (anything under five minutes, anything outside 1 to 120 g/h) and uses the median. With fewer than five usable jobs it falls back to 22 g/h.
2. One order is modelled as 100 g of plastic. At 22 g/h that is 4.55 hours of printing plus 12 minutes of bed-clearing and restart, so 4.75 printer-hours per order.
3. A printer is counted as productive for 22 hours a day. The rest is changeover and maintenance headroom.
4. So one printer finishes about 4.6 orders a day, and the fleet finishes that times the number of machines that are neither offline, in maintenance, nor held by a customer reservation.
5. Your run queues behind the existing backlog, and one handling day is added at the end to pack and hand the parcels to the carrier.

hoursPerOrder  = gramsPerOrder / gramsPerHour + 12/60
ordersPerDay   = printers * 22 / hoursPerOrder
printDays      = orders / ordersPerDay
quotedDays     = ceil(printDays + backlogDays + 1)   // min 1

One thing to know before you plan around a number: printers held by a customer reservation are carved out of order capacity entirely. If you want guaranteed throughput rather than a share of the queue, reserve machines — see /docs/farm/reservations.

Consistency across a batch#

What is genuinely consistent across a run, and what is not:

• Same slice, same profile, same nozzle and layer height on every plate in the run, so dimensional behaviour is repeatable.
• Same price on every unit. Billable weight rounds up to the whole gram per part, so the unit price does not drift.
• Colour is matched to a stock spool. The twelve stock colours are held; anything off that palette is priced at a $0.20/g floor (TPU keeps its own $0.25/g) because a spool has to be bought in, and a long run may cross more than one spool of the same colour.
• Parts may come off different machines. The fleet is Bambu Lab H2S and P2S, and a part printed on one is not bit-identical to the same part printed on the other.
• There is no automated dimensional or cosmetic inspection. Parts are checked by hand before packing; there is no per-part inspection record you can query.

When to talk to us instead#

• More than 50 of one part, which is the per-order cap on the API.
• A colour or material we do not stock, where the spool has to be sourced for you.
• A part larger than 340 x 320 x 340 mm, which is what the quote API will accept.
• A deadline. The website quotes a lead time from live capacity; it does not reserve capacity for you.
• A repeating order — the same part every month — which is worth scheduling rather than re-submitting.
• Anything needing non-standard packaging or your own inserts. See /docs/farm/packaging.

Against injection moulding#

Printing does not beat moulding at every volume, and pretending otherwise wastes your money. The difference is the entry fee. Moulding costs a mould before it costs a part; printing has no tooling at all and a per-unit cost that stays flat from part one to part ten thousand.

Choose moulding when the design is frozen, the volume is well past a few thousand, per-unit cost is the constraint you are optimising, and you can wait for tooling. Choose printing when any of those is not yet true — and note the common answer is both: print the first few hundred while the design settles and the market is proved, then cut a mould for the version you know works.