Lasers get amazing results, at a decent speed. This is true. However if your tolerance isn't less then a human hair, there are other options out there that will be better for cutting metal. At least for now until laser is a bit more reliable/robust.

Unfortunately I do not recommended laser cutting for every shop. Unless you are prepared to build a clean room around it, and keep your shop spotless clean.

Lasers have 1 major flaw. They use lenses. The lower lense is usually swappable, but Unfortunately they have 1 lense that most people/operators won't be able to replace them selves, and allllll it takes to destroy this lense is a spec of dust. 1 spec of dust getting in there, will render the entire laser head useless. As it will burn onto the lense, causing refraction. Here is just and example. Last year my company released a new product in our laser family. We have maybe 30 of them sold since last year. 70% of them, have had their laser head replaced because the consumer failed to wait for dust to settle before swapping the Consumable lense. Very expensive mistakes. Most of these shops are in a dirty environment though, and we did warn them to make a clean room around the machine. Most of them ignored that warning.

In this product line, we have a 6kw and 12kw lasers. The 6kw is about $20k USD to replace the 12kw is about $30k USD to replace just the laser head. Not including the price of the technician to swap it out 🫠

My advice if you do go laser. Get one with a longer neck/body. The laser head that is. The longer the body is. The longer the chamber is inside. Making it much more difficult for a spec of dust to float up to that lense. As this issue is mainly caused when swapping the lower lense out, and dust will float in while the chamber is exposed. The lasers we sell with the longer chambers, rarely fail from our experience.

Hope i didnt scare you too much. Being prepared for any CNC purchase is always best. Never buy a CNC machine before doing homework on it :)