Capacity and lead times

This page tells you what your part is actually waiting on, and how to look up the current number instead of trusting a printed one. Two clocks run in sequence: farm time, which is queue plus print plus handling, and transit, which belongs to the carrier. They are quoted separately everywhere on this page because they behave completely differently.

The three things you wait on#

Look up the current number#

The farm publishes its own capacity. It is a public endpoint with no key and no account, because it exposes counts only, never printer IDs or job names. It is the same data the panel on /farm renders.

curl https://x3dstudios.com/api/farm/capacity

{
  "generatedAt": "2026-09-09T14:02:11.418Z",
  "fleet": {
    "total": 3,
    "general": 3,
    "generalProductive": 3,
    "reservedOperator": 1,
    "reservedCustomer": 0,
    "available": 1,
    "printing": 2,
    "offline": 0,
    "maintenance": 0
  },
  "colourSlots": 4,
  "rates": {
    "gramsPerOrder": 100,
    "gramsPerHour": 24.6,
    "measured": true,
    "hoursPerDay": 22,
    "hoursPerOrder": 4.27,
    "handlingDays": 1
  },
  "general": {
    "printers": 3,
    "ordersPerDay": 15.5,
    "gramsPerDay": 1624,
    "backlogOrders": 4.2,
    "backlogDays": 0.26
  },
  "reserved": {
    "printers": 1,
    "ordersPerDay": 5.2,
    "gramsPerDay": 541
  }
}

How the lead time is worked out#

The arithmetic is deliberately simple and entirely visible. One order means 100 grams by default; the panel on /farm lets you change that and re-quote.

hoursPerOrder = gramsPerOrder / gramsPerHour + 12 minutes changeover
ordersPerDay  = productivePrinters * 22 productive hours / hoursPerOrder

printDays     = orders / ordersPerDay
totalDays     = printDays + backlogDays + 1 handling day
quotedDays    = max(1, ceil(totalDays))

• 22 productive hours per printer per day, not 24. The rest is changeover and maintenance headroom.
• 12 minutes of changeover per job for clearing the bed and restarting.
• One handling day covers cooldown, removal, the look-over, packing and the label run.
• Throughput is measured where possible: completed jobs are turned into grams-per-hour rates, rows shorter than 300 seconds or outside 1 to 120 g/h are discarded as bad headers, and the median of at least five survivors becomes the rate.
• A job already printing only owes the remainder of its grams to the backlog, scaled by its progress.
• A lane with no productive printers or no throughput returns stalled rather than a number, which the panel shows as Ask the operator.

What makes a print long#

Print time tracks material laid down and layers climbed, not the size of the bounding box. These are the levers you actually control at /print.

One thing that is never estimated: a file you sliced yourself. If you send a .gcode or .gcode.3mf to the print API, its measured grams and hours are used exactly as they are, and no estimated colour overhead is added on top, because your slicer already counted every purge. The hours themselves still count: any beyond what a normal print of that weight would take are billed as machine time at $1.50/hour, which is what makes a self-sliced four-colour plate expensive.

Dispatch, and then transit#

Once the part is cool it comes off the plate, a person looks at it, and it is boxed. Every print goes out in the same parcel: a 6 x 6 x 6 inch box booked at 1 lb, because a house standard beats a per-order guess and the carrier re-rates on real weight anyway. Labels are bought in a batch, so an order finished just after a label run waits for the next one.

• The carrier is recorded when the order is marked shipped, and the shipped email names it and links the tracking number.
• On /orders the tracking number appears as plain text without a carrier link. The email is the clickable copy.
• Delivered is set automatically. A daily sweep asks the carrier about every shipped order that has a tracking number and a known carrier, and marks it delivered when the carrier says so. An order whose carrier was recorded as Other is never queried, because there is no carrier to ask.
• Duties and import taxes on international parcels are yours.

If you have a hard deadline#

Priority print ($5 at checkout) puts your order at the front of the print queue and ships it in 1–2 business days instead of 4–5; express postage ($15) then shortens the transit to 2–3 business days. Every order carries a ship-by day, and the print queue lists priority jobs first, then the soonest ship-by, so the order promised first is printed first. Orders through the print API or the MCP server cannot buy Priority print yet and queue as Normal print. If you need it sooner than that:

1. 1
   Check the queue before you order

   Call the capacity endpoint and read general.backlogDays. That is the wait in front of you today, and it is the number that moves most.

   bashCopy

   curl -s https://x3dstudios.com/api/farm/capacity | grep -o '"backlogDays":[0-9.]*'

2. 2
   Say the date out loud

   Email [email protected] with your order number, or the model and material if you have not ordered yet, and the date you need it by. The operator can tell you whether it is achievable and will say if it is not. There is no automated promise behind this; a person answers.

3. 3
   Cut the print, not the queue

   Standard 0.2mm layers instead of premium, one colour instead of four, and 20% infill instead of solid all shorten the machine time you are waiting on.

4. 4
   Reserve a machine for repeat work

   If you need capacity you control rather than a place in the shared queue, book a printer by the hour or the day. A customer-held machine is carved out of the order lane entirely, so nobody else's queue is in front of you. See /docs/farm/reservations.

Next#