Bulk and production runs
Ordering 3D printed parts in quantity: the 5% and 10% discount tiers, how a run is spread across the fleet, lead time maths, and where injection moulding wins.
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#
| Quantity | Factor | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 4 | x 1.00 | No discount. |
| 5 to 9 | x 0.95 | 5% off the line. |
| 10 or more | x 0.90 | 10% off the line. |
/api/priceNo authQuote a part at a quantity. No authentication, no rate limit.
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#
| Quantity | How to order it | What matters at this size |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 4 | Upload at /print, or one API order per part. | No discount. The $1.00 per-part minimum still applies to very small parts. |
| 5 to 49 | One API order with quantity set, or ask for a quote. | 5% at 5, 10% at 10. Still lands in the general queue behind whatever is already there. |
| 50 to 500 | Split across API orders (50 is the per-order cap), or talk to us first. | Worth agreeing a colour and a material batch up front so the whole run comes off matching spools. |
| 500 to 5,000 | Talk to us. This is scheduled work, not queue work. | Machines are set aside for the run. Expect a delivery schedule in stages rather than one parcel. |
| 5,000+ | Get a moulding quote as well, and compare honestly. | Tooling starts paying for itself. Printing still wins if the design is not frozen. |
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- A printer is counted as productive for 22 hours a day. The rest is changeover and maintenance headroom.
- 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.
- 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| Run size | Plastic at 100 g/part | Printer-days of machine time |
|---|---|---|
| 50 parts | 5 kg | about 10.8 |
| 500 parts | 50 kg | about 108 |
| 1,000 parts | 100 kg | about 216 |
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 $0.20/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.
| 3D printing at X3D | Injection moulding | |
|---|---|---|
| Tooling cost | None | $5,000 to $50,000+ per mould |
| Per-unit cost | Flat: grams x rate, less 10% at quantity | Very low, once the mould is paid for |
| First part | Days | Weeks, after the mould is cut |
| Design change | Re-upload and reprint | Re-machine or re-cut the mould |
| Economic band | 1 to a few thousand parts | Roughly 5,000 to 10,000 units and up |
| Geometry | Undercuts and internal voids are free | Needs draft, uniform walls, no undercuts without side actions |
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.