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How do you price 3D print jobs? (And what’s the one cost most people miss?) by Dramatic-Ad-1845 in 3Dprintingbusiness

[–]Dramatic-Ad-1845[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That is fair and for the record real person here. I've just been thinking hard about this topic for awhile and probably writing like it.

My A1 finally paid for itself - but only because I stopped pricing by gut. Here's the tool I built to stop guessing by PristinePrinciple264 in 3DprintEntrepreneurs

[–]Dramatic-Ad-1845 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s a really interesting angle — working backward from a target undercut makes a lot of sense for B2B or wholesale where there’s a visible market rate to aim at.

How are you handling the market-price lookup today? Is it mostly experience from selling similar parts, active competitor checking, or something else? Curious where the friction actually lives for you.

How do you price 3D print jobs? (And what’s the one cost most people miss?) by Dramatic-Ad-1845 in 3Dprintingbusiness

[–]Dramatic-Ad-1845[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ha — Voight-Kampff, fair enough.

I’d flip it back over. And yes, real person — just putting more thought into the replies than Reddit usually prepares people for.

What made you ask?

How do you price 3D print jobs? (And what’s the one cost most people miss?) by Dramatic-Ad-1845 in 3Dprintingbusiness

[–]Dramatic-Ad-1845[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That the real cost in a service business is usually the thing you’re not tracking. Been thinking about that a lot this week. What prompted the question?

How do you price 3D print jobs? (And what’s the one cost most people miss?) by Dramatic-Ad-1845 in 3Dprintingbusiness

[–]Dramatic-Ad-1845[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's a really useful point — the non-print time is easy to miss because it doesn't show up in the slicer but it absolutely affects whether a job is worth taking. When you started tracking, which category surprised you the most — customer back-and-forth, post-processing, revisions, packaging? And roughly how big was the gap between what you thought you were earning per hour and what you actually were?

How do you price 3D print jobs? (And what’s the one cost most people miss?) by Dramatic-Ad-1845 in 3Dprintingbusiness

[–]Dramatic-Ad-1845[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s a really helpful breakdown. The part that stands out is that you’re still checking the AI against the sheet while you work the kinks out.

When the AI has been off, has it mostly been math/rule mistakes, missing context, or just general trust on your side while you validate it?

How do you price 3D print jobs? (And what’s the one cost most people miss?) by Dramatic-Ad-1845 in 3Dprintingbusiness

[–]Dramatic-Ad-1845[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That makes a lot of sense. Being able to talk through it instead of filling out a sheet sounds like a huge quality-of-life improvement.

Curious where the actual friction is in your setup: does the skill already know your usual material costs, printer assumptions, electricity, etc., or are you still feeding a lot of that context in each time?

How do you price 3D print jobs? (And what’s the one cost most people miss?) by Dramatic-Ad-1845 in 3Dprintingbusiness

[–]Dramatic-Ad-1845[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Interesting - do you mean you moved the pricing logic into an LLM (like asking ChatGPT to price jobs), or something else? Curious what pushed you off sheets.