I think that it is a cool feature.
Can you add it to the mobile website? I dont see a button or anything. Thanks broski!
8 years, 11 months ago
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From my understanding it is a feature that makexyz put on so that people who just need something printed can just upload their file and a email is sent out to us printers that says open print job. We can then choose to do it and print it for the price that is already set (as well as the shipping date). First come first serve kinda thing.
Kinda cool. Just sucks if your not at your computer. Because you can't accept the job.
I see there was another thread about the "suck-ness" of the feature. Anything new will have its bugs, I think overall it is a good idea. I like the fact that I can just quickly make money. I think the prices are little low, however it is money waiting for me to take it. You can't really complain with that. Honestly, we all know 3d printing is very work little when it comes to physical work.
Nathan and Chad, I say keep it up. Just curious on the pricing part. How do you figure it out? Can you add somehow for the support material and time used?
lol $8 is less than the $15 postage that I usually charge, nathan if $3 out of $8 is for postage then $5 is for printing the part, cleaning and posting and handeling!
Nathan what is your pricing procedure on these parts
"Pro" machine manufacturers are working very hard to bring their machine and consumable prices down.
The larger "print-to-file" companies, like Shapeways, are healthy investment opportunities and they're bringing their prices down too.
Print-to-file communities, like MakeXYZ, for instance, make a flat rate turnover, proportional to print charge. They're seen by those outside the 3D printing market as highly attractive investment propositions and, with the sales rate of new desktop and prosumer printers still on a healthy growth trajectory, they can tolerate a good degree of printer "turnover". So long as the market grows and the take-up rate outstrips the turnover rate, it'd be a reasonable assumption that they'll be happy enough. Quite simply, their priorities are not necessarily our priorities.
Nobody has a crystal ball but it's reasonable to assume that prices will erode still further over time. The only thing we can really hope to influence is the rate of erosion. Which means that, as a community, we should:
Resist any initiatives that tend to erode prices.
Demand more value-for-money - It's not enough to provide a platform, tell us we're awesome and rake in the cash. It has to be proactively promoted.
Offer value-added services wherever possible.
Promote our own services in our own communities and route work through MakeXYZ / "?"
Or, we could just give up. In which case, platforms like MakeXYZ and the whole concept of local manufacturing for communities will be consigned to the history books as little better than opportunistic pyramid schemes that exploited the explosive growth in the production of small 3D printers and when all's said and done, the only legacy they'll leave will be a small number of printing companies who somehow managed to turn a profit or had enough capital to expand.
May not seem a very positive prognosis and, of course, I'm playing Devil's Advocate to some extent but in my mind, the jury is still out as regards the sustainability of this model and we all need to raise our games. As a community.
However, at the moment there's nothing listed there. A week ago there were about 50 jobs, most of them consisting of dozens of duplicates of a few jobs. The system seems very buggy.
Worse, though, are the extremely low prices, and extremely high demands, that these jobs carry. See my other thread on the topic. People are uploading models and paying a quoted price, and then those jobs are being offered (to anyone who might accept them) for about 1/3 the amount that was payed, with MakeXYZ presumably pocketing the difference. And on top of that, the maker then apparently has to pay for shipping (and some of these jobs are quite large).
Even worse, if someone goes to your profile page, they'll see a big button that lets them upload a file, with the insinuation that they're ordering it from you specifically. So when no one fills that order (or does it in a sub-par manner), it can potentially make you look bad.