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7/10/2025, 8:59:06 PM
>>11485401
What are your expectations? Just a side hustle for fun, or a small business that can sustain you?
If the former, there's no harm in jumping right in and seeing what happens. But if you're aiming for something more serious I think it needs a bit more thought.
Do you have a rough idea of how long it would take to print, clean and cure a kit? This will determine the price, and from there you can figure how many you would have to sell to sustain yourself. If you can only print 20 kits a month and need $2k/month to survive, well then each kit is going for $100. Now you have to attack it from the other side. Is there enough demand to sustain that rate? This is much harder to figure. When doing the ST-26 bridgelayer I worked backwards from retail pricing to distributor pricing to likely factory direct cost. I estimated tooling costs at between 500k - 1mil, and from there figured that Hobbyboss needs to churn out 20-40,000 T-26s to break even. With all those potential customers out there I've still only sold like 30 kits out of 100.
Personally, I think level of effort and high prices make printing and selling challenging to break into. Model Monkey and Vargas seem to have done it though. That's why I went with the low cost digital route. I believe it's a better value for the consumer, and my break even point on each model is typically around 1000 purchases which I think is a conservative estimate of the total market out there.
>>11485412
Its likely anything you find online is not for commercial use, and even if it were, you're likely getting an stl file which will be hell to edit. There are no shortcuts, if you want to ensure quality youre gonna have to do it yourself.
What are your expectations? Just a side hustle for fun, or a small business that can sustain you?
If the former, there's no harm in jumping right in and seeing what happens. But if you're aiming for something more serious I think it needs a bit more thought.
Do you have a rough idea of how long it would take to print, clean and cure a kit? This will determine the price, and from there you can figure how many you would have to sell to sustain yourself. If you can only print 20 kits a month and need $2k/month to survive, well then each kit is going for $100. Now you have to attack it from the other side. Is there enough demand to sustain that rate? This is much harder to figure. When doing the ST-26 bridgelayer I worked backwards from retail pricing to distributor pricing to likely factory direct cost. I estimated tooling costs at between 500k - 1mil, and from there figured that Hobbyboss needs to churn out 20-40,000 T-26s to break even. With all those potential customers out there I've still only sold like 30 kits out of 100.
Personally, I think level of effort and high prices make printing and selling challenging to break into. Model Monkey and Vargas seem to have done it though. That's why I went with the low cost digital route. I believe it's a better value for the consumer, and my break even point on each model is typically around 1000 purchases which I think is a conservative estimate of the total market out there.
>>11485412
Its likely anything you find online is not for commercial use, and even if it were, you're likely getting an stl file which will be hell to edit. There are no shortcuts, if you want to ensure quality youre gonna have to do it yourself.
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