9 years, 6 months ago
Just had a bad experience with a member here. I was trying to offload some work since I am backed up but my client liked my sample and wants a bunch more. Member lists $0.25 per cm3 but when asked for a quote they want 3 times that. When I question that and offer them the rate the posted they become indignant, offer to sell me raw filament alone for that, and start lecturing my about how hard it is to get an $6000 dollar printer to print a 8cm3 part what with all the thermal deviations that have to be taken into account.
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I cant keep my nose out of things...lol. Everyone has a method that they like. We all have our reasons for it.
The only reason we charge for setup fee is because that is time on the job. Every machine shop, printing shop, etc. I know charges that. Because that is time out your day that your are doing for your customer that needs to be charged. In reality.... To do everything that you listed above could take an hour. Wouldn't you like to get paid for that?
Also the cab driver does charge you for the oil change. The charge rate is in the fee. If not then when the car needs an oil change they would have to pay it out of pocket...
That is all well and good but it is not the point, The point is, is your extra special service built into your flat rate cost or do you negotiate that each and every time? From what you say I doubt I can have you make anything for the price you list here of $0.25cm3 and so I propose that is very misleading. And you have no disclaimer on your profile that states setup and consulting fees are to be expected. Note that other posters on this thread went and changed their cm3 rates to be many times greater after posting here so I guess here they wised up some.
All of this leads me back to the reason I found your original post objectionable - it seems like your primary complaint is that you couldn't get someone to print your overflow at the price you wanted. According to your description, there was no bait and switch. You requested a quote, received a quote, and didn't like the price. A bait and switch would be if they quoted you one price and then billed another. If you've got so much work that you need to subcontract, then just invest in another printer and run your business the way you want.
And you are wrong, a bait and switch is advertising a product at one price and never having any product available at that price. So you work for $8 / hour, roughly $1 per cm3 but your listing says $0.25/cm3 which is blatantly false and skews the listings. Though you do state the cost clearly in your profile. So you need to change your listing to be $1/cm3.
What this site needs to do is allow you to also state that you want $25 up front on any order no matter the size. Kind of like when eBay changed to listing items with cost+shipping to deal with the abuse they had.
What if I want to base my profit margin on how long the model takes to print? That's a fair way of pricing since a 10cc thin flat plate will print a lot faster than a 10cc vertical rod would.... I should be compensated for the machine wear, power, and opportunity loss that resulted from having to print a tall vertical model.
Therefore, a reasonable option is to list the model material cost to the maker. Then you also have set up fees, model repair, etc etc. It really makes more sense to do custom quotes.
Another aspect of all this is that makexyz assumes models are in mm when it does estimates... what if the customer has an inch model? Or what I see frequently is models that have holes, inverted normals, etc can show up as really tiny volumes. So the customer may think "oh wow this is dirt cheap" but in reality it's an error...by your logic you could end up printing a huge model and basically have to do it for free.....